Wow. Two posts in a row that link to Seth Godin. Does that make me a fanboy?

In his post “In praise of a blank page“, Godin is essentially saying, “if it isn’t REALLY good, don’t ship it and refuse to market it.” I’m interested to see if this stirs up a hornet’s nest among the “release early / release often” folks.

We at Jobster tend to subscribe to the release eary / release often methodology. Alan Steele, our resident Duke of Products, often uses the chainsaw metaphor– if an initiative isn’t going to be finished by our target release date, we need to start lopping off features/complexities until it will. This obviously results in shipping a helluva lot of software, but sometimes results in releasing software that isn’t quite ready for prime-time. With an iterative development cycle, this is fine– you can always come back to it in the next 6-week cycle… Though sometimes, if a feature is in the “decent-but-not-great” category, you DON’T come back to it.

At Jobster, we do a pretty decent job of having the discipline to iterate on our previous efforts. But with new initiatives in play, there is always tremendous competition for resources. Inevitably, some code that we promised ourselves that we’d rewrite doesn’t get rewritten. Some UI that we know is a little bit clunky doesn’t get rebuilt… Sometimes, a feature is “good enough for now”.

So which is better? “Release now” or “release something perfect”?