Small fixes beat big features

I started building Collections for Edicek a year ago. It was web only. Three weeks ago I came back to it, wanting to build a simple proof of concept on iOS.

Collections aren't just "pick a collection when saving a bookmark." They have levels, like a tree. You need a tree view, search, the ability to create a new collection inside a tiny selectbox. Not just in root, but nested inside a specific category. What looked like a simple implementation in one place turned out to be needed in 8 places, plus 3 or 4 additional use cases I didn't see coming.

The scope was way bigger than it originally looked. I had to stop.

This keeps happening. Building products for myself and for clients, I keep running into the same trap. At some point you need to say "enough." Stop improving, stop adding, start polishing. Otherwise you end up in an infinite loop of changes and the product is never ready because you keep expanding scope.

So instead of pushing through Collections, I focused on low-hanging fruit. Two kinds.

First, small UX fixes. The sidebar on iOS could be overdragged from the edge of the screen and it looked broken. Not a crash, not a blocker. Just ugly. A small polish that took maybe an hour but made the app feel more solid.

Second, minor bug fixes for edge cases most users won't hit. But if you know about them and the fix takes 15 to 30 minutes, it's worth investing. These small fixes make the app more stable and behavior more predictable.

Big blocks of changes released all at once kill progress. Once you have something working, the best approach is to iterate fast, in small pieces, frequently. Even if some things are internal only, not visible to users, testable only by a small group, even with ugly UI. Ship it, learn, move on.

Collections will get done. But the app is better today because I fixed the sidebar instead.

This isn't about Collections specifically. It's about how you approach building anything. The products people love aren't the ones with the most features. They're the ones where a thousand small things just work. That's how you build something extraordinary. Not one big release. Hundreds of tiny fixes that nobody notices individually but everyone feels.