This book from 37Signals talks about some ways to keep things lightweight, effective and flexible enough to change quickly as you take things to market and garner feedback.

Its a philosophy we subscribe to wholeheartedly at SlicedBread. Its not just something startups need to practice (though indeed, for them its more or less a life-and-death issue). Across kinds of organizations, constraints work well towards helping identify the right set of features, right things to spike-solve, and towards getting hypothesis and experiments validated quickly. One might realize a need for repackaging, or extending or even dropping some features, but thats hardly something one can do in isolation from real users and usage. Various methodologies have advocated the same philosophy – XP, Agile, Scrum amongst others. It essentially boils down to realistic product planning and execution, and working with inputs from the real world as early as possible. Even if you’re building a product or feature around cutting edge research, this is equally important.

The cost of redesigning, redoing or even reconsidering the need for a feature or product shoots up the later in the game it happens. Time to market suffers majorly with feature bloat, big-bang design and plans often increase complexity and negatively impact reliability and change-friendliness of the product, and getting a whole army of developers doing multiple projects simultaneously does not help the cause of costs, or the crispness of the marketing message that needs to emerge.

Of course, there’s a world of difference is knowing it, and living it. And that’s what we’re aiming to help people do!