Cheap/fast/good

Ben Casnocha in his book My Startup Life makes the very good point that you can only have two out of three of the above, and it’s a good idea to pick which ones are important before you start.

In NPD, it’s complicated by the fact that cheap and good for the project aren’t necessarily the same for the product. So we have what I’m hereby dubbing the NPD hourglass. Pick two for each triangle but if you pick “fast” you need to pick it for both. A cheap fast project can give you a cheap product or a good product, not both. On the other hand a cheap good project can give you a cheap good product, but it won’t be fast.

Dave Nicolette has an interesting post on the subject of good enough now vs better later.  He quotes Gall’s Law: 

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.”

and goes on to discuss various takes on the idea that quick and simple is often better than slow and perfect. 

The aphorism I’ve tended to use for this is:

Your first try at anything is going to be wrong.  So make it cheap, simple, and wrong rather than expensive, complicated and wrong.

Which, now I think about it, is another way of saying your development process is going to be iterative whether you like it or not, so learn to like it.