I have seen projects die in spectacular ways: missed dates, leaked requirements, burned-out engineers. But the deaths that bother me most are the quiet ones — the projects that delivered exactly what the plan specified, one month before anyone who actually uses the product realized the plan specified the wrong thing.

Shipping is not the moment a checklist empties. Shipping is the moment a user gets value. Everything before that is rehearsal.

The best teams I have worked with do not worship the plan; they worship the smallest thing that could possibly be put in front of a user and learned from. They slice features down to slivers, not because they are afraid of work, but because they want the feedback engine running as early as possible.

This is a hard thing to explain to people who believe the chart is the promise. But the chart is the hypothesis. Shipping is the experiment. And the user is the referee.