“Creating something new is cool and easy; achieving perfection is the difficult part”
The decision to create something new or to improve existing work must be made carefully.
People commonly believe that newly creating all businesses and products is important. This is particularly true with the advent of ideas such as ‘lean startup’.
However, improving and updating an existing business or product is at least 10 times more difficult than creating it from scratch.
What makes updating an existing work more difficult is the legacy that was created with it; the impact of adjustment must be evaluated, and then the work can be improved.
Let’s consider making a 20-page document. It can be easy to write up a new paper. On the other hand, modifying one part of the paper must be accompanied by evaluating the impact of the change and adjusting all the other parts that are affected.
There are times when having received customer feedback about a new product, something seems wrong. And when you decide to create another new product, you can never get past designing a minimum viable product. At times, we need to ask ourselves whether the problem lies not in our business idea itself, but in our ability to “make something well,” or “achieve perfection.”
As a result of all these reasons, we get the urge to regress and rebuild from scratch, which is when we have to be extremely cautious in our judgments. Starting from square one seems like a fresh and easy start, but it means another round of time investment to get to where you already are. Then again, the difficulty of improving the product comes back to bite us.
To fundamentally solve the problem, an engineering approach is required. The detailed method will be discussed in the next post.
