Minimal Viable Product is old and busted
michaeldehaan.substack.com
Minimal Viable Product is old and busted
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Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted
#2Someone finally said it. Also not all things fit the mvp paradigm.
Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted
#3This seems to be arguing that the complete implementation is what matters most.
That seems expensive and risky.
Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted
#4Someone finally said it. Also not all things fit the mvp paradigm.
The Lean Startup is very clear on both the why and the limitations of an MVP. Within that framework what constitutes an MVP is pretty obvious. In a nutshell you need to put something out that helps you learn as much as possible as quickly as possible. That is the primary purpose of an MVP and it should be considered both minimal and viable in that context.
Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted
#5It's still a tried and trusted approach. It may not fit every situation, but there's a big emphasis on derisking and early marketing which can't be ignored. I'm incorporating options like that into https://cxo.industries, a web app to help founders with making informed choices.
Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted
#6MVP as a concept suffers from the whole “implement the acronym” problem. At one point it was a helpful tool for understanding some repeatable patterns in startup product management, but its turned into something else. I suppose its mostly cargo culting startup advice these days.
Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted
#7> An example of too much minimalism would be failing to implement UI pagination and your UI falling over with more than 20 objects, because you didn’t think about the use case. Maybe you haven’t thought about scale-out or upgrades or you can install on only one operating system. A serious buyer can sniff out this incompleteness and won’t take you seriously, and only serious domain experience can fill in these gaps. You can’t expect your buyer to be like “hey, nice try with this prototype but I can tell this won’t scale to more than 20 objects”. They are looking to you to be the expert.
IME this part is completely wrong, unless it's defining "serious buyer" in such a way that most of your market isn't one.
> Time is short, funding is short (especially if you are running on your own money), and you don’t want to waste time.
> Your company shouldn’t be in search of a business model, you should know what you need to build. Wait until you see the exact right thing, because you are about to put too much of your lifeforce into it, and if you don’t, you have a much harder road ahead. You want to know it will work, and this requires cultivated instinct. When the time is right and you know enough, that’s when you decide to have a product.
Ok so what is the author advocating doing until then? Sitting around twiddling your thumbs until inspiration strikes?
The whole point of the MVP is: build just enough to find out whether this is a viable business or not. And nothing in the article seems to be contrary to that. It's a whole lot of words but the only advice seems to be to have better instincts (how?) and just make a better product bro.
Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted
#8Your company shouldn’t be in search of a business model, you should know what you need to build.
This is exactly what killed my first startup. We believed we fully understood what the customer needs and that we should build the right product before we started selling. We were actually trying to build the minimum viable product, but we were hilariously (with hindsight) wrong about what the customers wanted. Almost all our ideas were just wrong enough to make the product fail to solve the customers pains. They solved the pains we'd had in the past brilliantly, but sadly that wasn't relevant. We weren't buying our product.
Starting out with the notion that you already know everything you need to know will kill your startup. Running a startup is as much about spotting and understanding the signals that you discover along the way as it is about building what you think you customers need.
A minimum viable product is not "selling the least effort product you can get away with", it's spending the least amount of time you can to build something that you can use to gather more data than you can use to focus your product on what the customer wants rather than what you think they want. Building what you think the customer wants will very likely be wrong - customers lie, they're deluded, they don't understand their own problems, and they can't see value in solutions. But they do start to understand the problem when they see a solution to it, even if it's the minimum viable solution. And then they start having ideas about what else they can pay for to make it better...
Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted
#9MVP is tool like any other. It might be used well (to validate an idea) or may be used poorly (to implement semi-functional piece of software, which is strictly worse than the peers).
There's also nothing wrong with pivoting, because while you may implement working businesses case, along the way you may discover one, that's better for you and your customers. Of course it can be used in pathological manner as any tool again.
I think, that what should be definitely busted in IT(or maybe in general?) is easily talking in absolutes (OOP best/bad, functional programming best/bad, k8s best/bad).
Everything depends on the context. Especially would be great to see that altitude from members of academia, because they influence a lot of young engineers.
Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted
#10MVP as a concept suffers from the whole “implement the acronym” problem. At one point it was a helpful tool for understanding some repeatable patterns in startup product management, but its turned into something else. I suppose its mostly cargo culting startup advice these days.
Yeah it has go kinda same way as "agile", where people use both terms without understanding what it actually means and how to implement those. But that does not mean that "agile" or "MVP" is death and you should not use those.