Ideal versus adequate solutions
The value of your efforts to solve a problem depends on what stage you’re at in developing a solution:
All the effort you put in to get to an adequate solution that you and your team can live with is the most valuable.
Any additional effort after that spent making a more ideal to generate marginal gains is valuable, just not as much as the value of your prior efforts.
The doctrine of marginal gains dictates that small improvements in any process do eventually lead to significant improvement, so the effort to develop more ideal solutions is still important.
Having said that, such an effort should only be undertaken if you already have adequate solutions for your most outstanding problems.
To do things in any other order is likely an efficient use of you and your team’s time and energy.
