Concept
Ship now
Ship now is Rework's rule that when the core of a product works, you launch it, because the market teaches faster than the roadmap and every feature you add before launch is one more reason not to ship.
The rule has two halves. The first is about subtraction: build half a product, not a half-assed product, in Fried and Hansson's phrase, by cutting scope rather than quality. The second is about timing: the moment the core delivers value, it goes out, imperfect, because customers will tell you in a week what a roadmap could not tell you in a year. Their most useful line for a founder in the build trap is to underdo the competition. The instinct is to match every feature a rival has and add one, and the result is a product that does everything adequately and nothing well, built by an exhausted team. Do less than they do, do it better, and let the simplicity be the reason to choose you. Shipping also requires protecting the time to build: long uninterrupted stretches, meetings declined unless they carry a decision, and a clear definition of what done means for this release.
A real-life example
A founder in Istanbul had been building a restaurant-reservation app for a year, waiting to add loyalty points and a waiting-list feature before launch. Told to ship the core, she released a version that did one thing, took a booking and confirmed it by SMS, to eight restaurants in Kadıköy. Within a month the restaurants had asked for a no-show deposit, which none of her planned features had covered, and it became the feature that made the product pay.
How to use it
- 1Write the one thing your product must do, cut everything else from this release, and ship when that one thing works.
- 2Underdo the competition on purpose: fewer features, done better, with the simplicity as the pitch.
- 3Protect uninterrupted building time, decline any meeting without a decision, and define done for this release in one sentence.