That's fair and valid, but shifting your culture from one that's laser-focused on shipping features that work to one that cares about shipping polished features that delights users definitely gets exponentially harder as your company scales in size.
The sweet-spot for making that transition is essentially as soon as you've found product-market fit, no later and no sooner, and missing that sweet spot even a little bit can make the transition very difficult and very costly. But the dilemma is, as most successful founders will likely tell you, we're only good at identifying product-market fit in hindsight, long after it happens (and it may never actually happen).
I've worked at plenty of companies that pay lip service to wanting to ship polished features that delight users while still overwhelmingly shipping features in a very utilitarian, timeline dominated fashion, long past the point where they've demonstrated product market fit.
As with anything in product/engineering/design, it's all about tradeoffs and striking the right balance, and where the right balance stands will always keep shifting under your feet as you make progress...
There is one way to make sure the product improves after shipping a quick-and-dirty first version: dog-fooding.
Be a user, for real. Many seem to think that just using the product equals dog-fooding, but real dog-fooding is when you can honestly say you get real value out of using the product. It is when you'd pay to use it.
When you use your own product and gets value out of doing so, you have true customer perspective and your needs are aligned with your customers needs.
The sweet-spot for making that transition is essentially as soon as you've found product-market fit, no later and no sooner, and missing that sweet spot even a little bit can make the transition very difficult and very costly. But the dilemma is, as most successful founders will likely tell you, we're only good at identifying product-market fit in hindsight, long after it happens (and it may never actually happen).
I've worked at plenty of companies that pay lip service to wanting to ship polished features that delight users while still overwhelmingly shipping features in a very utilitarian, timeline dominated fashion, long past the point where they've demonstrated product market fit.
As with anything in product/engineering/design, it's all about tradeoffs and striking the right balance, and where the right balance stands will always keep shifting under your feet as you make progress...