Seven Shipping Principles

Welcome to Rework, a podcast by thirty seven Signals about the better way to work and run your business. I'm your host, Kimberly Rhodes, and I'm joined as always by the cofounders of thirty seven Signals, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hanssen. This week, I wanna dive into one of the write ups on the thirty seven signals website called the seven shipping principles, which is our guidelines for how we ship and shape and build software at a sustainable pace is how it's written. David, I believe you wrote this, if I'm not mistaken. Let's go through some of these seven principles. We won't dive into all of them in too much detail, but a few of them I think are really important and interesting for people to hear about. The first one, we only ship good work. I think that's pretty self explanatory, but tell us a little bit about your thoughts on that. That was actually the point that motivated writing up these shipping principles in the first place, and it sounds self evident. But it's not actually as self evident as it sounds when you have spent weeks on something. You're out of time, and you've built something something that you could rationalize yourself into being okay to ship. But it's not okay to ship because it's not good. And good is actually a relatively high bar. It's better than okay. We could have written, we ship okay software. Do you know what? I am sure that would actually be a high bar in some establishments, but that is not our bar. Our bar is good software. And by articulating that as the bar, it gives us permission to say no. It gives us permission to say, yes. We've spent a fair amount of time on this one feature, this cycle, but it's not good software yet, so we're not gonna ship it. We're gonna eat that instinct that is to always deliver something and realize, occasionally, it's quite rare. I can remember only a handful of instances where we literally had to invoke this as a stop block. This is not going out because it's just not good enough. But it is also one of those things, and I think we talked about in one of the previous podcasts, that the ultimate test of we ownership good work really comes in in the eleventh hour. And that was the other reason I wrote this down is to say, do you know what? That's just facts. Good software is a all inclusive evaluation of what you've built. It's not this little piece here, this little piece there. It's all of it just as it's ready to go out. And that's usually when we're ready to ship or when we want to ship. It's when we've finished assembling all the pieces. So there's no wonder that that is the ultimate test for whether this should go out the door or not. And I wrote it down in …