Wabi-Sabi Product Management
Why good enough is good enough and when it actually works
Not every product needs to launch like a spaceship. Sometimes what you need is a canoe made out of optimism and one friendly engineer’s spare time. And that’s fine, in fact, it’s better than fine.
That’s wabi-sabi: the philosophy of embracing what’s incomplete, imperfect, and simple, yet still functional and meaningful. In product terms, it’s how things really get built, by learning to love the version that works now, even if it’s not the version you imagined.
You know this moment. You’re building a new feature, but designs aren’t ready, the backend isn’t scoped, and your Dev just ghosted mid-sprint. What do you do? You ship a Fake-Door MVP or fake the integration with a manual workaround. You build the smallest thing that works, not the prettiest, not the most scalable, not the one that’ll win a thousand hearts (Maybe it might). Just… the one that helps users do what they need.
We don’t talk enough about the humble MVP. Not the flashy one you pitch in a town hall with all the Post-it notes and the Figma walkthrough. I mean the one that lives in Google Sheets, Notion hacks, and sheer willpower. The one that doesn’t scale, but provides the things people really want. The one you’re almost embarrassed to show until you see it in real users’ hands, solving real problems.
The truth is, there will always be a list of things you wish you could fix. And maybe one day, you will. But wabi-sabi teaches you to release that guilt. To appreciate what you’ve built for what it is: a working, imperfect solution that people are already using. That’s not failure. That’s momentum.
Wabi-sabi isn’t about settling. It’s about seeing the beauty in progress and respecting what’s enough for now. It’s knowing that once it works, then you can scale. You clean it up, strengthen it, and add some polish when it matters. Not before. Because the early days are not for polish; they’re for proof.
That version you hacked together in a weekend? If it solves a real problem, it’s already more valuable than the perfect version stuck in Jira or GitHub. Maybe it looks a little bit off. Good. That means it’s real. That means it’s alive. And now, you’ve got something worth improving.
