Everyone should do a Beta

Every time, every single time I've been involved with pushing something new  to the World Wide Web (aka, internets), something has gone wrong.

Every time.

Much like death and taxes, you can be assured something will assault your otherwise perfect rollout.  No amount of planning can prevent it. Whether small or large, some unforeseen gremlin is going to attack right when you press the button.

So, how can we defeat the trolls of uncertainty?  Simple, roll it out as a beta.

Give every project you have a minimum one week beta before you ever start promoting to customers or users.  Invite select customers, get feedback, test on the live site with live data.  Most importantly, don't set yourself up for failure.

Give your project room to fail.  This leads to a much more constructive process of refining and improving the product versus the more typical firefighting and last minute patches you'll be forced to do otherwise.

Bake a beta (or 2!) into your next project.  Your team, and probably your cardiologist will thank you.