Comment by YZF
10 hours ago
There's features and there is quality and there is domain.
I worked on a team that built high precision industrial machinery. The team and the project manager decided to delay shipping because there were still problems. We delayed, fixed the problems, and the machine worked really well and was used for at least a decade. If we'd had shipped it too soon we would have to try and fix it at a remote site and likely it would suffer from problems.
With most products you want to figure out what is your MVP (minimal viable product) and what is the quality level your customers expect. If you ship something less than that it's probably not a good tradeoff. If you build too much and ship too late that's also not a good tradeoff. When shipping increments they also need to be appropriately sized and with the right quality level.
Ah, but you're talking about something else: hardware is quite different from software. Once your machine is out in the wild, you can't update it remotely. But with software, shipping MVPs and iterating is not only possible, it's almost always the right way to go about it.
I frequently tell my software teams "We aren't putting rockets in space; we're shipping an admin panel. We can revert code or change things if we don't like it."