What helped me the most in programming and design was to shift my thinking away from trying to create a complete (or “perfect”) product right from the start and

What helped me the most in programming and design was to shift my thinking away from trying to create a complete (or “perfect”) product right from the start and towards creating a minimal product with the most essential feature set first and iterating from there. I guess this is what the author wanted to point out. It helps me to avoid getting overwhelmed with complexity and, as a nice side-effect, to avoid premature abstraction and optimization. Most of all, it helps me (as mentioned in the article) to actually build something. It is also quite satisfying and motivating to quickly get to a state where your product already works and to build on top of that, making something better that already works. I used to work like that when I began programming, because I just wanted to solve a problem for myself and put it out there as quickly as possible. I had to re-learn this way of thinking as my ambitions grew and as I wanted to make things “perfect” and be “professional”. Of course, in this approach lies the danger of accumulating features and complexity, so it is important to keep the focus on the problem or the “essence” of what the product is supposed to be.