Whether it’s product or business strategy, until you decide what you’re not doing, you’re not going anywhere. Dreaming about the end state when your product is all-conquering and you’ve gone public on the NASDAQ is all well and good (and necessary), but you have to sit down, prioritize, decide what’s in and out of scope based on time and resources, before you have a hope in hell of going anywhere.

Raymond Chen has a great post along these lines:

Whenever I see a project description, I pay close attention to the section titled “What we don’t do.” That tells me how serious they are about shipping. And if there isn’t a “What we don’t do” section at all, I sigh quietly, since that tells me that they don’t yet know what they do.

His point is spot on. If you’re not telling people what a release won’t do, you haven’t thought it through enough. While this is something I’ve done to a certain degree in our design/spec work at Judy’s Book, I will be focusing on it more going forward. (It’s always cool when someone’s writing influences your actions. Don’t worry Raymond, I won’t blame you for anything in therapy. It’s all about personal responsibility after all.)

Thank you to Dare Obasanjo’s Top 10 Reasons your software project is doomed for pointing me to Raymond’s post.