Freedom by unrealistic expectations

We’re at that stage right now where the whole team is clicking.  Every 24 hours I’m seeing improvements that blow my mind away.  The more we get done, the fewer items left for us to do, the more I’m looking back and realize how TOTALLY INSANE my expectations were when we started.

When I first joined Replicate, our founders had already spent a bunch of time on the core databae and inference engine that drives everything we do.  Their up-front investment is what has enabled us to get to where we are today.  The rest beyond the core engine was good, but not what I was hoping for.  After a month of getting to know what’s going on, we emabarked on a massive push to completly overhaul our UI, the workflows, and everything about the product experience.

User experience is incredibly important to me, and I wasn’t happy with our state.  I confidently laid a plan for ripping the entire thing up, changing everything to the very core.  I committed to my boss that we could get this, “no problem”.  I signed up for all sorts of improvements, from new visualizations, new interface paradigms, new toolkits, and more.   Now, as we’re just two weeks away from release, I know I was totally nuts.  Not because we didn’t deliver everything I hoped we would – we did/have/are!  No, I was nuts because looking back, if each and every little thing hadn’t gone just right, we would never have made it here.  If we hadn’t hired an AWESOME UI engineer.  If our lead engineer wasn’t a rock star.  If we hadn’t managed to get an automation engineer and harness to remove the friction.  If the entire team wasn’t flexible enough to deal with massive change daily.  But we did, he is, we did and they are.  And so now, on time and on schedule,  we’re two weeks away from launching a product that I’m really excited about.

We’re a startup.  Odds say, we’re going to fail.  It’s only by having unrealistic expectations in the first place that any of us even can get into this job.  If we don’t keep having unrealistic expectations every day, we’ll get trapped by what we can’t do, and deliver just another piece of software.  IF we can keep being unrealistic, signing up for insane deliveribles every day, then I think we just might make it.