When "Good Enough" Is Good Enough

“Is this good enough?”

这个问题一次或另一次困扰着我们所有人。由于它超越行业，职位描述和技能，但在我们每个人中同时引发了一定程度的情感冲突，因此它具有普遍熟悉且个人为个人的能力是独一无二的。It’s a question that undoubtedly deserves an answer, or at the very least an exploration, and that is precisely what I hope to accomplish in this article.

Yet before I begin, we must first acknowledge one very important yet obvious fact:The answer to this question is dependent entirely on the context of the situation in which you find yourself asking it.

确定从投入时间提高质量的时间的回报降低的门槛 - 以及越过该门槛是否真的值得 - 最终是个人决定，必须权衡您公司经常竞争的要求和利益raybet电子竞技。因此，在认识到这一点之后，在这种情况下，我们对问题的上下文具体是有意义的。为了这些受众，我相信探索这个问题是最有益的，因为它与入站或与生产书面内容或更传统的创意抵押品（设计，视频等）的个人的工作有关，这将是最有益的。为他们的公司。

为什么创作者遇到这个问题

Yet is making this distinction really important? Unfortunately (for you), yes.

事实是，如果您对公司的入站工作负责任何内容生产的任何方面，那么您对创意产出的期望比几乎任何其他创意专业人员都要高得多。raybet电子竞技入站的核心是经常且始终发生的内容供人们消费的想法。Those two harrowing words -- frequent and consistent -- lead directly to the thing nightmares are made of for creative professionals: volume.当然，由于苛刻的客户持续压力，代理商的生活可能会感到压力。是的，B2C创意对质量的期望通常比其B2B对应物高得多。但是，没有其他创意专业人士或团队不断挑战以像入站创意者那样回答卷问题。

This situation arises from the scheduled nature of content delivery that is fundamentally important to inbound. Inbound creative is dictated almost entirely by time and deadlines, and while having a consistent schedule for content delivery is excellent in terms of improving both the discoverability of and engagement with your brand, it is the bane of existence for creatives.

Immoveable deadlines -- in almost all instances -- immediately signal to the creative professional that achieving a creative output in the ballpark of 100% of their potential quality is a thing of impossibility. For the creative professional, this manifests itself internally as concession and compromise in the best of cases, and immediate defeat in the worst.

The truth is, there does exist a direct correlation between the amount of time that can be allotted for a project and the potential to achieve maximum quality. In order to maximize the quality of a deliverable, then, the desired quality should dictate the deadline rather than the deadline dictating the quality. Unfortunately, inbound rarely allows for that, and sodiscovering a way in which to maximize the quality of our creative output within the constraints of an inbound timeline is the ultimate goal and eternal struggle of the inbound creative professional.

What Does "Done" Mean?

At HubSpot, the situation is no different. When I was first hired to run HubSpot’s internal creative and design team, I was tasked with the difficult job of figuring out how to improve the productivity of the team和the quality of the work it produced.

I spent the first several months exploring ways of minimizing distraction and inefficiency while maximizing the amount of time my team spent in a conceptual or production space (you know, the places where work actually gets done). Some of my efforts included: completely changing the team structure, minimizing the degree of formal procedure, cancelling all meetings for my direct reports, and even moving my team to a different area of the office. Yet more than any of these, the initiative I felt would most quickly have a positive impact on the team’s work was defining what it meant for a project to be “done.”

Far too often, both time and quality are lost because of a lack of clarity regarding late-game questions, such as who should give feedback, how many rounds of feedback should be given, the degree of change that can be requested, etc. My hope was that by defining what it meant for a deliverable to be “done,” I would successfully avoid such pitfalls, providing my team members with everything they needed to determine the proper process for completion, decide which stakeholders were appropriate to include in review, and feel empowered deciding when the things they were creating were good enough to ship. It seemed like a great idea, and I pursued it wholeheartedly.

What I quickly realized was that none of the most intuitive answers actually stand up to scrutiny.

“If the problem is solved, it’s ready to ship.”

“If the client approves, it’s ready to ship.”

“If the audience will love it, it’s ready to ship.”

“If it will be shared, commented on, and talked about, it’s ready to ship.”

While all of these appear to be obvious choices for a definition of “done,” the problem is they all fall short by not placing final quality assessment solely (or even mostly) within the domain of the actual creator. For example:

1. There are countless ways to solve the problems we routinely face, yet many of them don’t necessitate a creative solution requiring any kind of notable level of quality.Fixing something doesn’t make it good, in the quality sense. It just makes it usable by the audience, which should be the lowest level of acceptable in terms of the work we do.
2. 客户（或另一个部门）请求您的帮助，因为他们无法获得质量。The job of the client isn’t to dictate (or even recognize) if something is “good enough” to be considered done; that’s the job of a professional creative. The job of the client is to identify a need or opportunity and alert the creative professional.
3. 同样 - 观众绝不应该成为“足够好”的最终权威。Yes, the goal is that they find a deliverable beneficial because it improves their lives in some way (e.g. making them happier, easier, safer, etc.), but the truth is that the same effect could often be achieved with a completely stripped down version of the same deliverable. Surprisingly, audiences will consume something fairly shallow. Quality is what makes the shallow thing deep.
4. 人们一直分享废话。实际上，大多数病毒视频看起来好像是用土豆拍摄的。嗡嗡声是一件很棒的事情，但无论如何都不需要质量。实际上，内容通常是“成功的”in spite of它的质量。

现在，我对任何感觉（就像我最初一样）不同意并声称这些事物的某种或某种组合的人情感感伤，这正是要做的事情的含义。但是，作为回应，我要警告那些批评者认识到该主张的含义在创意工作的背景下。If we want to accept this, then we must deduce that neither high quality nor the authority of the creator is actually necessary in the best of cases, or even valuable in the worst, when determining if something is done. Neither my intuitions nor my career allow me to accept this as true, for if it is, then “good enough” is entirely creator-independent; the only thing that makes a thing good enough is the opinion of the audience, not the authority of the doer. For me, this is an unacceptable concession because it takes the role of discernment out of the hands of the people we typically take to be the experts and puts it solely in the hands of the pedestrian.

However, taking the polar opposite stance doesn’t solve our problem, either. While, yes, every creative professional would love to be able to say, “It’s good enough when I think it’s ready,” this unfortunately is neither practical nor even possible鉴于入站内容交付的预定性质。

So a middle ground must be found. However, it’s important to realize the implications of this: By developing a definition for “done” that includes to some degree a requirement which dictates that the creator is a determining factor regarding whether something is “good enough” to be considered done, we are admitting that the definition implies that subjectivity is important, even fundamental.

“足够好”的公式

This is how my original pursuit for a definition of “done” evolved into the question of what and who determines when something is “good enough.” Admittedly, I was ready to just forfeit and say, “You know what? We’ll just spend every possible moment working on something -- improving, polishing, and refining it -- until I absolutely have to ship it.” Unfortunately, this isn’t realistic; inbound usually puts us in the position to be responsible for multiple projects simultaneously, so it was still beneficial to figure out a method for determining when we could comfortably move from one project to another.

What I was failing to realize, though, was that my pursuit for a definition of “done” had actually given me a much clearer picture of what I was looking for in terms of “good enough”. In fact, while I didn’t have the answer itself, I did have the structure of the answer: The answer to the question of whether something is “good enough” will ultimately strike a balance between the subjective and the objective, making sense of the self-approval of the creator, an objective quality component, and the need for a formalized system which allows for uniform application of the test in all instances -- all while working within the constraints of an inbound timeline.

From there, all I needed was to find a solution that accounted for these variables. Having spent the last year and a half continually refining, reducing, and rethinking this, here is what I’ve come up with.

A deliverable can be considered "good enough" when:

1. 它成功解决了问题，解决需求或传达了预期的消息，
2. 它显然是在品牌上，
3. The quality of work is consistent with or above the level of previous work,
4. It has been thoroughly yet objectively scrutinized by other qualified individuals, and
5. The final decision of preference had been left in the hands of the creator.

The first two are self-explanatory; they are the most fundamental requirements for preparing a deliverable to be shipped. The third transitions our focus to quality. By ensuring that each subsequent deliverable is as good as or better than the one before it, you guarantee not only that you’ll maintain the quality of your brand, but that -- over time -- your brand’s quality will continue to progress with each passing project. However, the last two deserve explanation, as they are the ones responsible for allowing us to find a middle ground between the subjectivity of the creator and some modicum of objectively graded quality. Fortunately, there is a way to achieve this middle ground while also aligning with one of the most fundamental elements of creativity: collaboration.

面对现实吧，我们所做的工作确实非常困难。The truth is, humans have advanced to the point where most of the problems we’re presented with are incredibly hard to solve, and because there is only so much information one human brain can handle, we have all had to become increasingly specialized in our knowledge and skills. This specialization has a major implication when it comes to creativity: it has increasingly become a group process -- a fact that holds true across almost every field and discipline. This is for a good reason: the increasing complexity of human knowledge, coupled with the escalating difficulty of the kind of work for which we are responsible, means that人们必须一起工作或失败。

接地的主观的关键就在于此objectivity. By putting the thing in question under the scrutiny of others, it is possible to make the subjective more objective. Crowd sourcing consent (or dissent) has value in that it can triangulate a shared vision of what is “good enough,” and while collecting what in science would be considered a statistically significant sample size is neither possible nor beneficial (design by committee, anyone?), there is value to having other qualified eyes scrutinize the work. Yet how do you avoid falling into the same trap of making “good enough” entirely creator-independent? My answer is by following a method of agile feedback I use with my creative team, which I refer to as “climbing ladders.”

以典型的项目为例。我要做的第一件事是与客户或利益相关者会面并评估他们的需求。这包括采取他们的要求和规格，我开始从中为我们如何解决该问题提出一个想法或概念。然后，我将所有这些信息（包括我的概念）都带回了我的创意团队。现在，如果他们决定将这个想法朝着不同的方向发展，那很好。重要的是，他们的下一步是建立一个初始可交付。

但是，我的工作还没有结束。然后，我必须进来并将可交付的铃声放到铃声中。我推开它并拉动它。我咬它。我竭尽所能戳破其中的孔。从那里开始，我的创意团队的工作是回去工作，并堵塞这些漏洞，以捍卫我对我给予的所有批评和反馈的辩护。

Yet again -- my job is not over, and so we repeat this process again. And again. And again. And in this way, we keep climbing the rungs of this ladder until we get to the point in which the only feedback I have sounds like this: “Well I would更喜欢if …” And once we’ve reached that point -- the point of preference, where I’m no longer objectively justified in my feedback -- that the deliverable is done and ready to ship, and my creative team gets to put the final stamp on it. In this way, I get to a point in which the deliverable is defensible -- I can sit in any room with any executive or client and justify all of the decisions -- but my creative is happy because s/he has had final say. In that way, I get an objectively defensible deliverable, and my creative gets his or her subjective grade of quality.

Thus is the method HubSpot’s internal creative and design team uses in order to strike an optimal balance between productivity and quality while successfully operating within the demands of an inbound delivery schedule. By following this system, I’m able to comfortably make the call when something is good enough to wrap up and move on to another project, all while staying true to the brand, ensuring a constant progression of the brand’s quality, keeping my team of talented creative professionals happy, and not falling victim to a never-ending queue of deadlines. Yet there is one final note that deserves mention as it relates to those deadlines: Help yourself by making sure they’refair。

Deadlines can be随意的; eventually, you have to deliver the things you’re working on, and it is often motivating to set a date at which point you’ll do so. Deadlines can besudden; we often need to be agile enough to be able to make the most of an opportunity by responding to it in real time. However,截止日期绝不应该既任意又突然。A fair deadline, then, is one in which the date of delivery iseitherdistant enough to permit its arbitrariness or meaningfully important enough to justify its suddenness. By following this rule, you’re more likely to stack the cards in your favor, providing yourself with the time needed to achieve that grade of “good enough."

我认为这篇文章“足够好”

We’ve now come to the point where I feel comfortable deciding that this article is good enough to move on. I believe I’ve answered the question I set out to. The work is not only in line with HubSpot’s brand, but I would like to think consistent with the high level of quality that has come to be expected. Most importantly, though, it’s been reviewed by my insanely qualified peers, and yet I’ve been allowed to make the final call on how to end it.

也许我只是厌倦了it. As my good friendRichie Stewart--one of Boston’s most highly-respected designers -- recently reminded me: “Dude, it’s good enough when the imperfections aren’t punching you in the face anymore.” Very true.

But in reality, I’m just out of time.