Yeah, usually.

As a product manager, being embarrassed about the product you're shipping isn't just normal, it's often *required*. It's your job to find flaws and then convince your team to fix them. If you're shipping a product where you can't see the flaws, it either means you are unable or unwilling to find the many flaws in your shipping product (bad!) or that you've waited too long to ship this version of your product (also bad!).

PMs live in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction about the currently shipping product, because by the time you're shipping the current version you've already planned the next version which is going to be better. Also you're painfully aware of all the tradeoffs and compromises that had to be made so you could ship the current product. Any sizable product ships with hundreds if not thousands of known bugs, design flaws, incomplete features, etc. And that's just the known ones! If you fixed every bug and honed every feature, it would never ship and your company would go out of business.

Also, more fundamentally, the best way to find the flaws in your product-- and their relative priority-- is to ship the product! Your customers will usually be less picky then you are, but they'll also inevitably value different things about the product than you will. They will find different flaws. They will ask for things you hadn't thought of. They will teach you things about your product and their needs. But you'll never learn all this unless you ship it. Of course, you should also do focus groups, usability testing, etc. but you get orders of magnitude more useful information from users using your product in production every day.

Also, most products are inherently iterative. There's always another release. This is especially true in software. Getting the revenue and customer learnings from having a shipping product is usually better than polishing it in the lab.

What's especially challenging is that the success of your product often involves convincing everyone else (Sales, Marketing, your users, journalists, etc.) that your current release is the BEST PRODUCT EVER. Otherwise why would they sell/promote/buy/write about it? So as a PM you're always hiding your embarrassment from almost everyone, and even when you don't hide it you'll get no sympathy. When Elon Musk complains about all the flaws in Teslas, do you think people nod sagely and agree with him? Nope, they probably think he's just being a perfectionist whiner because everyone knows the Tesla is the BEST PRODUCT EVER!

None of this means that as a PM you have a license to ship crappy products every time. Figuring out when a product is good enough to ship is an important skill it will take time to learn. But for the people who grow into good PMs, the learning part is learning how to ship sooner than your perfectionist, aspirational instincts tell you to. Good PMs will just ship the damn product anyway, but that's definitely a learned skill for most PMs, not something that comes naturally.

Some more thoughts about "is it good enough to ship?" decision:

• What matters isn't what you think (e.g. embarrassment), it's what your customers think. Will your customers like/buy the product? Will *they* think you should be embarrassed?
• Customers' tolerance for product flaws is related to their current state. If you're selling a product into a market with bad solutions or you're solving a problem with customer demand but no competitors, then customers may be very tolerant of flaws, so ship early. Dropbox and Expensify and many other products succeeded not because their initial products were so good but because their customers were so dissatisfied with current state that they were willing to overlook an embarrassingly incomplete solution. You don't have to be perfect, you just have to be much better than the alternative!
• The reverse is also true. If you're selling into a market with many high-quality solutions, then it's not OK to ship crap. Tesla can't ship a "just OK" car given that they're competing with BMW, Mercedes, etc. which are already pretty great cars.
• Tune your "good enough to ship" bar to the cost of fixing what you mess up. If fixing means patching a few lines of code or making an online form more usable, ship early and often. If you're selling hardware, especially expensive hardware (e.g. cars, spaceships, etc.) your quality bar is obviously a lot higher because a product recall can bankrupt you. If messing up can kill people (e.g. medical devices) then please, please don't ship crap.