Chapter 2 · Practice 2 of 4
Finish things: shipped, adopted and measured beats started
Why it matters
Unfinished work has no impact. A feature behind a flag nobody turned on, a migration at 90%, or a tool nobody adopted all look like effort but not results.
Land your work fully:
- Ship it to real users or real systems.
- Drive adoption: announce it, write the docs, help the first users.
- Measure whether it did what you said it would.
- Close it out: remove old code paths and flags.
A smaller project carried all the way through usually shows more than a large one abandoned halfway.
Do
- Write down the success measure before you start
- Follow up a few weeks after launch
Avoid
- Moving on as soon as the code merges