Every day you make a tiny bit if progress. You make one thing just a smidgen better. A tiny improvement that will barely benefit anyone. One inch.
There are thousands of these tiny things.
It takes a mindset of constant criticism to find them. And as you fix more and more of these little details, as you polish and shape and shine and craft the little corners of your product, something magical happens.
The inches add up to feet, the feet add up to yards, and the yards add up to miles. And you have a truly great product. The kind of product that feels great, that works intuitively, that blows people away. The kind of product where that one-in-a-million user doing that one-in-a-million unusual thing finds that not only does it work, but it’s beautiful: even the janitor’s closets of your software have marble floors and solid-core oak doors and polished mahogany wainscoting.
And that’s when you know it’s great software.
Loosely copied from “More Joel on Software”