ReWork

you’re comfortable with. Once your product does what it needs to do, get it out there.
    Just because you’ve still got a list of things to do doesn’t mean it’s not done. Don’t hold everything else up because of a few leftovers. You can do them later. And doing them later may mean doing them better, too.
    Think about it this way: If you had to launch your business in two weeks, what would you cut out? Funny how a question like that forces you to focus. You suddenly realize there’s a lot of stuff you don’t need. And what you
do
need seems obvious. When you impose a deadline, you gain clarity. It’s the best way to get to that gut instinct that tells you, “We don’t need this.”
    Put off anything you don’t need for launch. Build the necessities now, worry about the luxuries later. If you really think about it, there’s a whole lot you don’t need on day one.
    When we launched Basecamp, we didn’t even have the ability to bill customers! Because the product billed in monthly cycles, we knew we had a thirty-day gap to figure it out. So we used the time before launch to solvemore urgent problems that actually mattered on day one. Day 30 could wait.
    Camper, a brand of shoes, opened a store in San Francisco before construction was even finished and called it a Walk in Progress. Customers could draw on the walls of the empty store. Camper displayed shoes on cheap plywood laid over dozens of shoe boxes. The most popular message written by customers on the walls: “Keep the store just the way it is.” *
    Likewise, the founders of Crate and Barrel didn’t wait to build fancy displays when they opened their first store. They turned over the crates and barrels that the merchandise came in and stacked products on top of them. †
    Don’t mistake this approach for skimping on quality, either. You still want to make something great. This approach just recognizes that the best way to get there is through iterations. Stop imagining what’s going to work. Find out for real.
    * Walt Stanchfield,
Drawn to Life: 20 Golden Years of Disney Master Classes
, vol. 1,
The Walt Stanchfield Lectures
, Oxford, UK: Focal Press, 2009.
    * Pasolivo Olive Oil, Zingerman’s, www.zingermans.com/product.aspx?productid=o-psl
    * “About Kingsford: Simply a Matter of Taste,” Kingsford, www.kingsford.com/about/index.htm
    * Fara Warner, “Walk in Progress,”
Fast Company
, Dec. 19, 2007, www.fastcompany.com/magazine/58/lookfeel.html
    † Matt Valley, “The Crate and Barrel Story,”
Retail Traffic
, June 1, 2001, retailtrafficmag.com/mag/retail_crate_barrel_story

CHAPTER
PRODUCTIVITY

Illusions of agreement
    The business world is littered with dead documents that do nothing but waste people’s time. Reports no one reads, diagrams no one looks at, and specs that never resemble the finished product. These things take forever to make but only seconds to forget.
    If you need to explain something, try getting real with it. Instead of describing what something looks like, draw it. Instead of explaining what something sounds like, hum it. Do everything you can to remove layers of abstraction.
    The problem with abstractions (like reports and documents) is that they create illusions of agreement. A hundred people can read the same words, but in their heads, they’re imagining a hundred different things.
    That’s why you want to get to something real right away. That’s when you get true understanding. It’s like when we read about characters in a book—we each picture them differently in our heads. But when we actually
see
people, we all know exactly what they look like.
    When the team at Alaska Airlines wanted to build a new Airport of the Future, they didn’t rely on blueprints and sketches. They got a warehouse and built mock-ups using cardboard boxes for podiums, kiosks, and belts. The team then built a small prototype inAnchorage to test systems with real passengers and employees. The design that resulted from this getting-real process has significantly reduced wait times and increased agent productivity. *
    Widely admired furniture craftsman Sam Maloof felt it was impossible to make a working drawing to show all the intricate and fine details that go into a chair or stool. “Many times I do not know how a certain area is to be done until I start working with a chisel, rasp, or whatever tool is needed for that particular job,” he said. †
    That’s the path we all should take. Get the chisel out and start making