11–19 of 19 posts
The article is a response to famous startup advice, continuing the conversation of just how "minimal" should be an MVP.
In other words bake not a subset of a cake, but a smaller cake.
Admittedly I've never worked at a startup. I've always taken MVPs as a releasable proof of concept. Reminiscent of the "tracer bullets" discussed int The Pragmatic Programmer. If you're trying to prove a market, yeah, an MVP would look like the skateboard -> car image. If you're trying to prove a technology, it would look like an internal combustion engine strapped to some tires. If it was a passenger vehicle, it wou…
It's not that customers don't like MVPs, it's that customers don't like shitty unfinished things.
So I put a moratorium on that terminology both internally and in our external communication. Now we use "Minimum Viable Experiment". Because it implies that we've established a stable hypothesis, that we've considered what a test and validation plan should look like, established completion criteria, and nobody starts prematurely projecting expectations of sales onto an experiment.
The product discovery and development processes are entirely outside that experimentation process. Though one clearly feeds it and the other is fed by it.
This has been very successful in keeping expectations aligned and in check consistently internally, externally, and with our investors/board. Even just making the change in language forced a conversation to explain it and that by itself was worth the small shift in terms.
My MVPs typically are pretty much complete applications. I can't see it being any less whilst still being new and innovative.
This just seems like nothing but fluff: Simple = Minimum Complete = Product Lovable = Viable People (including me!) just suck at knowing what an MVP is, and tend to release 2-3 connected MVPs at once.
Particularly if X, or things that have been labeled X have been cause for concern.
Such trival considerations as X' == X don't always get the attention they deserve, as seeing this requires an amount of understanding of the problem and not just the fustrations of using X.
*insert generic engineer gripe at how common it is that the people making the purchasing decisions - the target of marketing - don't have said amount of insight.
tl;dr: yup pure fluff
In other words bake not a subset of a cake, but a smaller cake.
I heard a variation of this once: an MVP for a car is a skateboard, not 4 wheels and an undercarriage.