We all want to deploy the best software possible to delight our customers and please our product owners. There’s always one more feature, another performance improvement, and code we just wish we wrote better. If we ship imperfect software, we may lose our customer’s trust. But if we never ship, we will never get feedback from actual users to learn what really needs to be improved and what already works fine. Knowing how and when to say yes to shipping imperfect software is a challenge at all levels, especially for new leads.

I want to share strategies and tactics I’ve used to get software out the door, in all phases of the development lifecycle. How to work with product owners to arrive at a true minimum viable product. How to work with fellow developers to minimize risk while maximizing productivity. How to negotiate with QA on what are true show stoppers. And how make users our partners throughout the entire process.

It’s possible to ship messy software and feel great about it!