On shipping small things

The most useful habit I have picked up in the last few years is shipping the smallest possible version of a thing and watching what happens next.

Not “MVP” in the startup sense — that word has been overloaded into meaninglessness. I mean the version that does one useful thing for one person and could be deleted by Friday without anyone noticing. The version where the README is three lines.

Why small things win

A small thing has fewer places to hide. If users do not engage, you cannot blame the missing feature you never built. The signal is clean.

A small thing also forces you to choose. You cannot ship every idea you have; you have to pick the one that matters most. That decision is the project.

The trap

The trap is that small things look unimpressive on a resume. So we add scope. We add a dashboard. We add a settings page. We add a fourth backend service “for scale.” None of it changes whether the thing works.

Resist.