Coding Required

The Cost of Not Delivering Incrementally

2025-07-16•4 min read

Look, I'm going to be real with you. Every time I've tried to build something "the right way" by keeping it under wraps until it's perfect, I've ended up with a half-finished project, a stress ulcer, and a team that looks at me like I just told them we're pivoting to blockchain.

Here's the thing about long projects: they're like that leftover Chinese food in your fridge. The longer it sits there, the less appetizing it becomes, and eventually you're just carrying around this mental burden that makes you feel slightly queasy every time you think about it.

The Four Horsemen of Project Apocalypse

If your project is taking forever, congratulations! You've probably hit one of these classics:

  1. Perfectionism Disease - "I can't ship this until the button animations spark joy!"
  2. The Scope Monster - Started as a simple form, now it's basically Salesforce
  3. Feature Creep Fever - "You know what this needs? Machine learning!"
  4. Professional Pride Syndrome - "We can't show users something that's only 80% done!"

I've collected all four like they're Pokemon cards.

My Greatest Hits Album of Failure

Let me tell you about my Angular to React migration. Oh boy. This was going to be THE migration. Clean, elegant, a masterpiece of modern web development.

And because I'm a slow learner, I did THE EXACT SAME THING with our V2 release. Currently doing it with our website redesign too. I'm basically a professional at this point.

The Real Cost (It's Not What You Think)

Here's what nobody tells you: the real cost isn't the time. It's the mental weight. Every day you don't ship, you're adding more code to test, more scenarios to worry about, more ways things can go wrong. It's like carrying around a backpack that someone keeps adding rocks to. Eventually, you're going to throw out your back.

The Solution Is Stupidly Simple

Release. Incrementally. Period.

I know, I know. Your inner perfectionist is screaming. Mine was too. But here's what happened when we finally shipped our Angular to React migration in pieces:

Users actually LOVED IT. They saw we were making improvements. They got benefits immediately instead of waiting for our mythical "perfect release." They even helped us catch bugs early when they were easy to fix.

Your New Religion: The Two-Week Rule

Here's your new process:

  1. Pick a feature/improvement
  2. Give yourself TWO WEEKS max
  3. Ship whatever you can finish in that time
  4. Repeat

Can't finish it in two weeks? You don't need more time. You need less scope. Cut that thing down like you're preparing vegetables for a stir-fry. Smaller pieces cook faster.

I just did this with our marketing page redesign and I swear I could feel my blood pressure drop. It's like magic, except it actually works.

The Bug Math Nobody Wants to Admit

PS: Here's some uncomfortable truth - incremental releases mean fewer bugs. When you ship 100 lines of code and there's a bug, you fix one bug. When you ship 10,000 lines of code, you're playing bug whack-a-mole while your house is on fire.

PPS: Yes, I know you're thinking "just write bug-free code." Cool story. Here's reality: expect about 1 bug per 1,000 lines of code. That's being optimistic. And bugs don't scale linearly - they multiply like rabbits. One bug causes another bug, then you write code that depends on the buggy behavior, and suddenly you've got a whole bug family reunion happening in your codebase.

The Bottom Line

Stop treating your releases like they're your master's thesis. Ship small, ship often, ship ugly if you have to. Your users would rather have something that works today than something perfect next year.

Trust me, I've tried it the other way. Multiple times. It's like touching a hot stove repeatedly and being surprised it still burns.

Just ship it. Your future self (and your team) will thank you.

Anbin Muniandy
CEO & Principal Engineer, YoPrint