Perfectionism is a red flag

Last post I talked about drilling into unknowns before you build — learning the geology of what you're about to do. Here's the uncomfortable thing that happens when you do that well. You find a lot of problems. And for each one, your brain immediately starts proposing solutions.

If you find yourself convinced there's a perfect one — that's the red flag.
Perfectionism isn't about quality. It's about psychology. It's your brain protecting itself from a hard truth. Every solution is a trade-off. Choosing one means accepting that from some angle, it's not ideal. That's uncomfortable. That's the weight you have to carry as a builder. And perfectionism is just a way to avoid picking it up.

Before our daughter was born, my wife and I read everything — or so we thought. We'd gone deep on sleep, feeding, emotional development. We had the night sleep routine figured out before she even arrived. Then she arrived and we discovered how daily naps reshape your entire day — how every trip, every plan has to bend around them, how much logistics goes into something we hadn't even thought about. We completely missed that side of sleeping. And that's just one example. As she grew, so did we. We started seeing things as they are — options where none of them was perfect, but as parents we had to make quick decisions in the given situation, own the consequences, and do it again and again.

That's exactly what good product decisions feel like.

There's a saying — perfect is the enemy of good. Most people interpret it as a time problem. Finding the perfect solution just takes too long. I don't think it ever was about time. And with AI today, it definitely isn't — you can explore ten alternatives before lunch and build something that looks perfect faster than ever. But that's exactly the trap. If you're using AI to always polish one more thing on your perfect idea, it only pulls you deeper into the rabbit hole and keeps you from seeing reality clearly.

The problem is that perfect solutions don't exist. Building toward one is your brain pretending the trade-offs aren't real. And it's not just trade-offs. It's risks and unknowns too. Every solution has things that could go wrong, things you don't fully understand yet. The perfectionist brain doesn't want to see them — because seeing them means admitting you're about to make an imperfect decision under uncertainty. But that's always the situation. Pretending otherwise doesn't reduce the risk. It just means you stopped looking for it.

See things as they are. Choose the right trade-offs. Accept the risk of being wrong. Own it.

Don't chase perfection. Be the product leader who sees reality clearly — and builds what matters, not what's "perfect".

This is post 4/8 from my talk at Dev/Hack/Day, @BTC Prague 2025.