Ship It and Move On: The Recipe for a Mediocre Product

Great Products Need a Second Act

Here’s a roadmap I see all the time. Feature X ships in March. The team will celebrate. Stakeholders will be happy. And on the following Monday morning, the squad is pulled onto Feature Y.

Feature X sits there. Untouched. Unrefined. Customers poke at it, find the rough edges, work around the limitations, and quietly stop using it. Six months later, someone in a board meeting asks why adoption of Feature X is so low and nobody has a good answer.

I had this exact conversation with a client yesterday. The original plan was “deliver the new component so the team can get on with the next thing.” There was zero iteration time built into the roadmap. Zero. The implicit assumption (and it’s an assumption so widespread it’s almost invisible) was that v1 would be good enough and the team should move on.

When I reminded the room that shipping v1 was only step one, that there would necessarily be a stream of enhancements, and that we should keep the squad allocated to that component for a few more months, do you know how much pushback I got?

None.

Not a murmur. Because when you actually say it out loud—“we’re going to spend three months building something and then walk away from it before customers have even told us if it works”—it sounds absurd. It is absurd. But it’s the default assumption baked into most roadmaps I see.

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The Agglomeration of MVPs

Let me describe the product this creates.

It has a dozen features. Each one doesn’t crash; each one was built to a minimum specification; each one was shipped; and each one was left to languish. The onboarding flow technically functions but confuses new users. The reporting module produces reports but doesn’t answer the questions customers actually ask. The integration with the CRM syncs data but doesn’t handle the edge cases that matter.

The sales team sold the vision. The implementation team has to deliver the reality. And the reality is that when a customer scratches the surface of any feature, it doesn’t actually help them solve their problem.

I see this pattern constantly. The sales team (or often the poor implementation team or often the poor customer) quickly become fed up with a product where nothing is great. They’re the ones looking the customer in the eye, trying to explain why the thing that was sold to them doesn’t quite work the way they expected. Eventually they stop selling certain features entirely, or they start building workarounds that should never have been necessary.

This isn’t a product. It’s a graveyard of abandoned MVPs.

Most MVPs Aren’t Viable

Let’s be honest about the term “MVP.” Minimum Viable Product. The word doing the heavy lifting there is viable: it means the product is good enough that someone would actually use it to solve a real problem.

Most MVPs I see fail that test. They’re the Minimum thing the team could ship under pressure from eight different stakeholders all clamouring for their favourite feature. The team cuts corners—not because they’re lazy, but because it’s the rational response to being told to deliver everything and given time to deliver nothing properly (and don’t get me started on the team saying YAGNI when clearly we 100% are going to need it).

The result is something that’s minimum but not viable. And here’s the critical failure: there’s no resource allocated to incrementally improve it. V1 ships, the squad moves on, and the feature sits there—technically functioning, practically useless—forever.

Marty Cagan nails it: “Half or more of product ideas won’t work, and it’ll take two to four iterations to get something that makes money.” Two to four iterations. Not one. If your roadmap shows a single block of work followed by nothing, you’ve planned for failure.

Why This Happens

This isn’t a mystery. It’s a failure of the product organisation to explain to stakeholders how great software is actually built.

Eight Stakeholders, One Roadmap

The root cause is nearly always the same: too many competing priorities and insufficient discipline in protecting the product. Eight stakeholders each want their pet feature. The product team, instead of having the difficult prioritisation conversation , tries to keep everyone happy by promising a bit of everything.

The maths is brutal. If you have eight months of work and twelve months of roadmap, you might just about deliver everything as a v1. But if each of those features needs two to four iterations to become genuinely good (which Cagan tells us they will) you actually have sixteen to thirty-two months of work. Something has to give, and what gives is quality.

This is a feature factory pattern. The team optimises for features shipped rather than outcomes (the number of customers whose problem we have actually solved). The roadmap becomes a production line where success is measured by what goes out the door rather than what impact it has on customers.

The Governance Gap

In organisations where roadmap governance works well, this problem is much less severe. Good governance means regular, structured conversations about what’s working, what isn’t, and where resources should be allocated next. It means someone is tracking whether shipped features are actually being adopted, actually solving the problem, actually moving the metrics.

Without governance, features ship into a void. Nobody checks whether they worked. Nobody asks whether iteration is needed. The roadmap rolls forward, the next feature starts, and the last one is forgotten.

If you’ve prioritised correctly up-front , it’s also much easier to justify spending time on iteration. When you can show that Feature X addresses your highest-priority objective—say, reducing churn among your top-tier customers—the case for making it genuinely excellent is self-evident. You’ve already agreed this is the most important thing. Why would you do it badly?

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The Human Cost

Engineers Are Heartbroken

Nobody goes into software engineering to ship mediocre work. Engineers want to build things they’re proud of—things that solve real problems, that customers love, that they’d happily put on their portfolio.

When an engineer ships v1, they can see exactly what needs to happen next. They know the edge cases that need handling. They know which parts of the UX are awkward. They know the performance bottleneck they had to defer. They have a mental list of the twenty things that would make this feature genuinely great.

And then they’re pulled onto something else.

That’s heartbreaking. It’s demoralising in a way that’s hard to overstate. Over time, engineers in this environment stop caring about quality—not because they don’t want to, but because they’ve learned that quality doesn’t matter. V1 is all there will ever be, so why fight for something better?

This is one of the reasons priority whiplash is so destructive. It’s not just the context switching. It’s the accumulated disappointment of never finishing anything properly.

Customers Learn to Be Disappointed

On the customer side, the damage is slower but more insidious. Each underwhelming feature release trains customers to expect less. They stop getting excited about announcements. They stop trying new features. They develop a background-level scepticism about whether your product can actually deliver what it promises.

Research consistently shows that over 50% of consumers will switch to a competitor after a single bad experience. In B2B, the average annual revenue churn sits around 14%. Every half-baked feature you ship is quietly increasing the probability that your customers will churn—not dramatically, not immediately, but steadily, relentlessly.

The really dangerous thing is that this churn doesn’t announce itself. Customers don’t call you up and say “Feature X was underwhelming so I’m leaving.” They just gradually disengage, and one day when their contract is up for renewal, they don’t renew. By the time you notice, it’s too late.

The Fix: Plan the Second Act

The solution is almost embarrassingly simple: build iteration time into the roadmap explicitly, and make it visible to everyone.

Show It on the Grid

This is where a squad-by-sprint grid becomes essential. On a timeline or Gantt chart, work appears as a continuous bar—it’s hard to distinguish between “building v1” and “iterating based on customer feedback.” On a grid, you can see exactly what each squad is doing in each sprint.

A good roadmap for a major feature might look like this on RoadmapOne ’s grid:

• Sprint 1-3: Build and ship v1 of the customer reporting module (with a clear outcome on adoption)
• Sprint 4: Customer discovery—how are they using it? What’s missing? What’s confusing?
• Sprint 5-6: Refinement based on customer feedback, while also beginning discovery on the next objective
• Sprint 7: Refined problem statement, second iteration ships

That’s what one of my clients is doing right now. They’ve planned the release of a new capability that addresses a major customer problem, then a month of consolidation and customer discovery on that problem, then a refined problem statement to go at it again the following month. The squad isn’t idle during consolidation since they’re also doing discovery work on their next objective. But the critical thing is that iteration time is explicitly planned, visibly allocated, and protected.

Respect WIP Limits

This only works if you’re limiting work in progress . If a squad is allocated to three different objectives simultaneously, there’s no space for iteration… every sprint is consumed by competing demands. WIP limits create the breathing room that makes iteration possible.

One objective at a time. Ship v1. Iterate. Get it to the point where customers genuinely love it. Then move on.

The 70/30 Rule

A practical heuristic I use with clients: plan for roughly 70% of capacity on new delivery and 30% on iteration of recently shipped work. This isn’t a hard rule, some features need more iteration, some need less. But if your roadmap shows 100% allocation to new features with zero iteration capacity, you’re planning for mediocrity (oh and don’t forget that actually 30% of your plan should be for KTLO ).

That 30% isn’t waste. It’s the difference between a feature customers tolerate and a feature customers love. It’s the difference between adoption rates of 20% and 80%. It’s the difference between a product that competitors can easily replicate and one that has genuine depth.

What Good Iteration Looks Like

Iteration isn’t just “fix the bugs.” It’s a structured process that starts with understanding whether v1 actually solved the problem.

Phase 1: Listen

In the first sprint after v1 ships, the squad should be doing customer discovery. Not building—listening. How are customers using the feature? Which parts are they ignoring? Where do they get stuck? What workflow did you assume they’d follow, and what are they actually doing?

This is continuous discovery applied to a specific, recently-shipped feature. It’s targeted, focused, and time-boxed. You’re not boiling the ocean—you’re answering one question: did v1 work?

Phase 2: Refine the Problem Statement

Based on what you’ve learned, refine the problem statement. Maybe the original problem was right but your solution missed the mark. Maybe the problem was subtly different from what you assumed. Maybe customers revealed a related problem that’s actually more important.

This is where outcome-based roadmapping shines. The objective on your roadmap isn’t “build reporting module”—it’s “enable customers to understand their pipeline health in under 5 minutes.” V1 was your first attempt. The refined problem statement is your second, informed attempt.

Phase 3: Iterate with Precision

Now you build again—but this time you’re not guessing. You have real customer data. You know which assumptions were wrong. You can make targeted improvements that have outsized impact because they’re based on evidence, not speculation.

This is where the magic happens. V2 is almost always dramatically better than v1, not because you’ve thrown more engineering time at it, but because you’ve thrown informed engineering time at it.

Phase 4: Validate

Did the iteration work? Are customers using the improved version? Have the metrics moved? This closes the loop and determines whether another iteration is needed or whether the team can move on to the next objective with confidence that they’ve left something genuinely excellent behind them.

The Board Conversation

If you’re a product leader, you need to have this conversation with your board and executive team. Here’s how I’d frame it.

“Our roadmap shows six major capabilities shipping this year. Each one addresses a genuine business objective that we’ve agreed is high priority . Here’s what I need you to understand: shipping v1 of each capability is necessary but not sufficient. If we ship all six as v1 and move on, we’ll have six mediocre features and customers who are disappointed six times.

“Instead, I’m proposing we ship each capability and then allocate the squad to iterate for one to two more sprints based on customer feedback. This means we might ship five capabilities instead of six this year. But those five will be genuinely good—customers will adopt them, metrics will move, and our product will have real competitive depth rather than a thin veneer of functionality.”

No reasonable board will push back on this. They don’t want mediocrity any more than you do. They just need someone to make the trade-off explicit—which is exactly what a well-governed roadmap does.

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Signs You’re Falling Into the Trap

How do you know if your team is shipping and moving on too quickly? Look for these symptoms:

Low feature adoption rates. You ship features but usage data shows customers aren’t using them—or they try them once and stop. This is the clearest signal that v1 wasn’t good enough and nobody went back to fix it.

The implementation team is struggling. If your customer success, implementation, or support team is constantly building workarounds, creating custom documentation, or managing expectations downward, your features aren’t finished. They’re prototypes in production.

Engineers have stopped suggesting improvements. In healthy teams, engineers are constantly saying “we should also do X” or “customers would love it if we added Y.” If they’ve gone quiet, it’s because they’ve learned that nobody listens. There’s no point suggesting improvements to something the team will never touch again.

Your product feels wide but shallow. You can tick a lot of boxes on a feature comparison matrix, but when a prospective customer asks to see any individual feature in depth, you find yourself steering the conversation elsewhere.

Sales is selling the next release, not the current one. If your sales team has started saying “that’s coming in Q3” instead of showing what you’ve already built, your current product isn’t good enough to sell on its own merits.

The Compound Effect of Excellence

Here’s what most roadmap conversations miss: the compound effect of doing things well.

A feature that’s genuinely excellent doesn’t just satisfy the customers who use it. It builds confidence across your entire customer base. Customers who see one thing done brilliantly start trusting that other things will be done brilliantly too. They give you the benefit of the doubt. They try new features with optimism rather than scepticism. They renew their contracts without shopping around.

Conversely, a product full of half-baked features has a compound negative effect. Each disappointment reinforces the last. Customers become conditioned to expect mediocrity. Trust erodes. And trust, once lost, is extraordinarily expensive to rebuild.

Reducing churn by just 5% can boost revenue by 25-95%, depending on your industry. That’s not a typo. The economics of retention are staggeringly favourable, and product quality is one of the most powerful levers you have.

Conclusion

Software is, as the title suggests, the gift that keeps on giving. It’s never done. The first version is the beginning of the conversation, not the end of it. Teams that understand this—that plan for iteration, that protect time for refinement, that treat v1 as the opening of a dialogue with their customers rather than the closing of a project—build products that are genuinely great.

Teams that ship and move on build products that are merely adequate. And in a competitive market, adequate is just a polite word for forgettable.

The fix isn’t complicated. Show iteration on the roadmap. Respect WIP limits. Allocate 30% of capacity to making recently shipped work genuinely excellent. Have the governance conversations that protect this time from being eaten by the next shiny feature request.

Your customers don’t need more features. They need the features you’ve already shipped to actually work brilliantly.

Stop shipping and moving on. Start shipping and making it great.