The team recently got together for a weekend to work together, hack, make decisions, and maybe more importantly have a few laughs. The first thing we did as a group was a “walk the store” exercise where we put all of our UI surfaces on a screen and clicked through every page and flow. Well, technically we ate a bit of junk food first and then proceeded to walk the store!

In my opinion it was one of the most productive and invigorating things we’ve done together as a team. Oftentimes, when you get together with others you’re working with, there’s a tendency to think about the future. What you could do, what is new and exciting to explore, dream a bit about what things might look like 10 years from now. It’s a little less exciting to sit down and revisit what you’ve already done and how it could be better.

Revisiting can feel kind of boring! It feels like spending time on things you’ve already figured out or on things that you could justify with a “it’s fine.” But that “it’s fine” mentality is a slippery slope. It’s an insidious mindset that compounds over time and before you know it, most things you ship aren’t actually fine despite still justifying it with an “it’s fine, ship it.”

Building quality products means not falling into the “it’s fine” mindset. The most obvious way you can spot if you’re falling into it is if you’re just about finished with something, but you notice there’s this little thing that’s a bit weird, maybe it’s an edge case, maybe just something to worry about if you notice it happening more frequently. When you find yourself starting to think down that path, stop! Just do or fix that thing before shipping it.

That last mile of work is so difficult. The vast majority of people don’t do it. It’s often quite hard to get to the point of the last mile in the first place so the thought of going just a bit more is exhausting. But those little edge cases, inconsistencies, and slight annoyances are the difference between making something great, and surprisingly great. It’s also worth noting that the gap between “great” and “surprisingly great” is actually quite larger than you realize!

The “walk the store” exercise we did was so invigorating because it uncovered all the things that are a bit off but, more importantly, it also uncovered the times where we said, “its’ fine.” Quality is not something we’re striving for at rethink. It’s the foundation of what we want to do. As much as we may want to do high quality that the first time around, the reality is that sometimes we need to revisit and find those times we let “it’s fine” get the better of us.