Progress over perfection

Loved this article from Melody Wilding, LMSW on how to stop overthinking

As designers, we’re trained and pride ourselves on getting tight with the details. We love building it right. Perfectionism is so satisfying.

As we grow in our practice and careers, others expect us to go beyond that, to get out from under the details. We need to add another layer of value: figuring out what’s the right thing to build. But we often think “right” means “perfect”, and maybe in some situations, that’s true.

More often than not, “right” means “progress”. It means framing the opportunity or problem space tightly enough for us to make hypotheses about potential solutions to create a feedback loop to validate our understanding of the opportunity or problem.

I’m biased towards progress over perfection because I’m confident that this approach will give me more opportunities to learn how close or far off I am to unlocking value than the approach that seeks to perfect and polish a solution that could be well off the mark, but by the time the solution is deployed, it’s too late to course-correct or worse, the conditions have changed.

These are the real risks to over-thinking.