Stop Polishing What Doesn’t Exist
The Cost of Waiting for Perfect
Perfectionism quietly kills progress. In customer operations, it often shows up as bloated timelines, endless conversations about the “ideal” customer journey, and products that never make it past internal planning.
What many teams forget is that progress beats perfection. Getting something in front of people is what unlocks real learning and momentum. Let's look at how this plays out in the real world.
1. The MVP trap
Many startups spend too long building behind the scenes. Product teams often get caught up refining every screen, solving for edge cases, and holding back releases until everything feels “complete.” But all that polish can delay learning, momentum, and impact.
A well-known UK fintech took a different approach. They launched early with a basic prepaid card, a simple balance view, and a waitlist. There were no extras, no advanced features, just a core function that worked and gave customers something to use straight away.
It wasn’t perfect. But it was real.
That early version gave them direct access to user feedback, behaviour, and expectations. They quickly identified what features actually mattered, where people got stuck, and what needed improvement. More importantly, they started building a relationship with their users, not just a product.
Instead of assuming what customers needed, they let usage shape the roadmap. That small, functional launch gave them clarity, traction, and room to grow with intent.
Too often, companies overbuild before they’ve validated their assumptions. Releasing something small but usable creates space to adapt, improve, and evolve without wasting time on features no one asked for.
💡Lesson: Focus on solving one real problem well. Build the smallest possible version that can deliver value and learn from how it’s used.
2. Overengineering before understanding
A pet insurance startup, fresh from a funding round and preparing to scale, invested early in a fully featured helpdesk platform. They implemented ticket routing rules, complex SLA matrices, and onboarded an offshore support partner to handle expected volume.
The problem? They hadn’t yet mapped out what customers were contacting them about.
In the first two weeks post-launch, nearly 80% of queries were caused by a single issue in the sign-up journey: a date-of-birth validation bug that blocked registrations for customers with newly adopted pets.
Had they started with a shared inbox and manual tagging, the issue would’ve surfaced almost immediately. Instead, time and effort went into configuring workflows that masked the root cause and delayed resolution.
💡Lesson: Complexity too early can hide the real problem. Start with simple, transparent tools that help you see before you try to optimise.
3. Internal tooling that takes too long
In customer operations, we love a good dashboard. QA scores, escalation trackers, performance boards. But when teams wait months for the perfect system, nothing moves.
One CS manager skipped the queue. They built a basic tracker using a collaborative doc. It took 2 days to launch and immediately helped the team prioritise feedback and coaching. By the time the official tool went live three months later, they already knew what worked.
💡Lesson: You don’t need the final version to start. A half-built tool that solves today’s problem is more useful than a perfect one that arrives too late.
Speed doesn’t mean sloppiness
This isn’t a call for lazy work or broken experiences. Creating quickly still needs care. You are still responsible for trust, functionality and safety.
The difference is in mindset. Creating early versions helps you learn what matters and cut out what doesn’t. Waiting for perfection keeps you stuck in the hypothetical.
You're not lowering the bar. You're choosing to test your assumptions in the real world.
Build to learn, not to impress.
Final thoughts
If you're hesitating to launch, publish, or share because it's not quite perfect yet, you're probably already behind. The longer you wait, the less you learn.
Get something out there. Listen to what happens next. Adjust with intention.
Stop polishing what doesn’t exist. Create first. Perfect later.
