Completion is Binary
When Evan and I were starting Gimme, one of the early mottos with our small product team was “Completion is Binary.” This was reactive to some of the early project management errors we had.
When we were building the first version of our first product, we were faced with a tight timeline, a huge amount on-the-job research to do, and a litany of tasks to knock-out. After a while, we’d start finding ourselves in the middle of a hundred ongoing projects, but not bringing any of the across the finish line. It became compoundingly harder to manage. The tyranny of urgent over important took over. Next actions were constantly overlooked and missed until the impact cascaded into other parts of the project. It was chaos.
We took a step back to look at the mayhem. The realization was the discrete tasks themselves were not that complex, but the difficulty of building new things atop nearly-finished-but-still-incomplete foundations was the heart of the issue. I added more engineering product management research to my own personal development (my favorite being “The Mythical Man Month”).
Distilling what we learned from others into simple principles, we embraced a more disciplined view of task management. Of the handful of guiding principles we adopted, one of the simplest yet useful is “Completion is Binary.”
Without a "completion is binary" mindset, the tyranny of urgent over important took over... It was chaos.
With a binary, yes/no, done/unfinished, alive/dead, view of every single task, we realized how few things we had actually brought all the way across the finish line. It was the starting point for better accountability for each contributor in a project. When we added daily standup meetings with these black and white updates of each tasks, it became clear where effort had to be concentrated and what subsequent tasks were in jeopardy. The team rallied, development progress leapt forward, and we launched the system on time!
For new entrepreneurs working on their first product, beware of the temptation to classify things as “done” when they’re only a line of code / single validation test / etc. from actually being done. Be disciplined. If they’re not done, they’re “not done.” Let completion be binary.