You're making a mistake...

There's a common mistake I watch for in myself and my team. Making a lot of stuff and calling it progress. More workflows, more skills, more dashboards, more output. It feels productive. But most of it is slop.

The rule we run by: nail it before you scale it. Get one thing working, proven, sharp, before you pour fuel on it.

Here's the concrete test we use inside our company. A skill you built does not count until at least ONE other person uses it. Not you. Someone else, doing real work, getting a real result from it. Writing the skill is easy. Proof is somebody else using it because it made their job better.

That changes behavior. It stops people from shipping things nobody wants. It kills the vanity of a big library that looks impressive and helps no one. If you can't get a single other person to adopt your thing, it doesn't work yet, and no amount of scaling will fix that.

Same logic for dashboards. A dashboard that doesn't change a decision is just decoration. Before you build one, name the business outcome it's supposed to move. If you can't, don't build it.

So the order matters. Prove it with one. Then, once it's clearly working and someone besides you relies on it, scale it hard. That sequence makes a world of difference between a compounding system and a pile of slop.

Pick one thing you made this month and ask yourself this: has anyone but me used it? If the answer is no, fix that before you make another.

To nailing it before scaling it,

Eric Siu