Start Cooking

Imagine you're starving.

You need food now. But your team of chefs is designing a seven-course tasting menu. They’re sourcing truffles. Debating sauces. Crafting foams. Meanwhile… you’re still hungry.

The false promise of perfect plans.

That’s what happens when software teams overthink. Instead of shipping a simple fix, teams chase perfection. Users suffer. And the plan—no matter how beautiful—rarely survives contact with reality.

The Marshmallow Challenge illustrates this perfectly. MBAs plan meticulously, only to fail. Kindergarteners? They start with the marshmallow and iterate their way to success.

UX is no different. 25 years ago Nielsen Norman Group advocated for running “as many small tests as you can afford” because each iteration teaches you something you could not have learned without the previous step.

Overthinking Creates Two Big Problems.

1. It delays solving the problem today. The illusion of efficiency from all that planning often results in actual waste—real people struggling with real issues while teams polish a spec.

2. You’re not going to get it right the first time anyway. As the saying goes: No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

Do Something. Anything.

People fear the “waste” of rewriting code. But they ignore the massive waste of waiting. Done right, early work is designed to be thrown away. That early code or design concept may be relegated to the dustbin of history, but its DNA lives on in later versions. That’s not waste. That’s evolution.

So start small. Ship fast. Learn early. Your users don’t need perfection. They need progress.

As Reid Hoffman said: "If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late."

Starting small delivers value early and often. Big Plans delay impact—and may never catch up.