Commercial software—the kind you sell to other people—is a game of inches.
Every day you make a tiny bit of progress. You make one thing just a smidgen better. You make the alarm clock default to 7:00am instead of 12:00 midnight. A tiny improvement that will barely benefit anyone. One inch.
There are thousands and tens of thousands of these tiny things.
It takes a mindset of constant criticism to find them. You have to reshape your mind until you’re finding fault with everything.
And as you fix more and more of these little details, as you polish and shape and shine and craft the little corners of your product, something magical happens. The inches add up to feet, the feet add up to yards, and the yards add up to miles. And you ship a truly great product.