Launching new stuff is exciting!

It could be a new product, game, service, anything. The important part is you got it into the world. You have it out there. You're showing everyone your best. Or are you?

Maybe it's not ready yet. Perhaps you can add *just* that one more feature. There's one quick change that would make this all SO much better. Oh, or this other thing that you absolutely must add before launch.

Your goal deadline rushes past. You're weeks behind schedule, aimlessly setting new deadlines, goals, launch targets until, well, you don't even know anymore. Somehow you've gone way past your original project scope. You have a giant project to maintain and many features to finish but not even any users yet. You're still working in that staging environment, after all.

Feature creep is the killer of passion projects, projects without a defined scope, and those that require 100% satisfaction with everything put live. You can spend days babying your new idea, months even, but you're never going to feel like it's perfect. There will always be that one last adjustment, or unique feature to add, or this "quick" fix... but it's never quick. And instead of just that one, you've now gone through 50 and are still finding tweaks to do. 

When you find yourself working on a seemingly endless scope, take a step back. Instead of comparing it to what you had yesterday, compare it to what you had two months ago. Get the perspective of an unbiased outsider and see what they think. Decide what is critical for your scope, and cut all else until after you have a product live. You can always push updates after the fact.

You might be your own best critic, but while you're perfecting, the market continues to move forward.

- Devon