We've gone to production! That's right, a few days ago we shipped our digital files to our manufacturer, and we're currently holding our collective breath, waiting to see the results. The past few weeks we have been working round the clock to finalize every detail of the game board, the box, the questions, the cards...the works, really. And we've learned two important lessons.
Lesson one: Going from 99% to 100% takes at least five times longer than you planned. There are a million tiny details to fix. There's graphics formats to convert. There's grammar to correct. There is proof-reading to be done, for the umpteenth time. There are formulations to argue over. Crossing the i's and dotting the t's takes weeks.
We learned lesson one a few weeks ago, when we thought we were nearing completion, but we still seemed to spend 16 hours a day in the office. But we hunkered down and set to it, determined to reach our deadlines.
Our deadlines are now past, the files have been submitted, and we can proudly announce that we learned another lesson during the last few days before the deadline:
Lesson two: You are never actually going to get to 100%. No matter how much time you spend ironing out all the details, fixing, proof-reading and so on, there is always a potential for improvement.
I believe we have a killer product. I believe this game will rock the socks off anyone who gets to own it, to play it. I genuinely believe this is it, the perfect engineer game. But there will still be details that I know could have been better. As with any product, of course, but this is OUR product. Realizing that perfection is unattainable is a hard pill to swallow.
I like the reflection. Great post. The second issue is a difficult one, or as linkedin founder Ron Conway puts it: "If you aren't embarrassed by your first product launch, you've launched too late" :-)
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