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Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

michaeldehaan.substack.com

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Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#21

Post by TameAntelope »

smilespray wrote: post #18
rmbyrro wrote: post #15

> The risk is you’re going to build something and nobody will come (or stay), and then you’ll run out of money. Maybe author is conflating MVP with "build and they'll come". They're quite different ideas, although are frequently seen together in the same minds. "Build and they'll come" is silly. 95% of businesses will need effort to bring products to consumers. Some form of marketing and/or sales. One great risk is w…

> Maybe author is conflating MVP with "build and they'll come". They're quite different ideas, although are frequently seen together in the same minds. I think the author is pointing out that other people are conflating the ideas. I don't think the author advocates building a fully-fledged 1.0 product before getting real-world feedback. I've worked for startups that kept shouting "MVP, MVP" for each new feature (and…

Then you weren’t building MVPs, because V stands for “viable”.

Devs I’ve worked with will sometimes hear “MVP” and think “prototype”. Not really sure why. An MVP needs polish, it’s just a way of keeping a narrow focus and avoiding bike shedding.

Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#22

Post by smilespray »

TameAntelope wrote: post #21
smilespray wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe author is conflating MVP with "build and they'll come". They're quite different ideas, although are frequently seen together in the same minds. I think the author is pointing out that other people are conflating the ideas. I don't think the author advocates building a fully-fledged 1.0 product before getting real-world feedback. I've worked for startups that kept shouting "MVP, MVP" for each new feature (and…

Then you weren’t building MVPs, because V stands for “viable”. Devs I’ve worked with will sometimes hear “MVP” and think “prototype”. Not really sure why. An MVP needs polish, it’s just a way of keeping a narrow focus and avoiding bike shedding.

Absolutely agree. I was about to make an edit to my post pointing out that we missed the "viable" part.

I work in UX, so I kept shouting to deaf ears. Unfortunately, it was seldom my decision to make.

Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#23

Post by smilespray »

CipherThrowaway wrote: post #16

Bit of an arrogant and directionless rant with no concrete detail and many false dichotomies. "Just build the right product" is like saying "just don't write bugs" or "just have money." It feels like DeHaan is reacting to the idea of exploration because he thinks you should just know everything to begin with. Knowing everything upfront is definitely better than exploring your domain, product and market incrementally.…

This wasn't what I got out of the article.

Too many people focus on the Minimum, and don't care about the Viable or the Product. There are table stakes. MVP doesn't mean half-assed and buggy. They misuse the concept and release any old crap.

As a result, MVP has become too much of a buzzword and the intention behind it got lost.

Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#24

Post by rozenmd »

In my experience, building into a "red ocean" of 200 competitors, the MVP concept is still valid, but the goalposts have shifted.

Whereas before the advice might have been "just build a tiny solution to the problem you're solving, and see what people think", these days folks don't take you seriously without SaaS-like features around it, like inviting their team to the tool, auth, etc

Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#25

Post by TacoSteemers »

rmbyrro wrote: post #17
jiggawatts wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IME this part is completely wrong, unless it's defining "serious buyer" in such a way that most of your market isn't one. I used to be such a "serious buyer". I represented a large government agency with over 2,000 sites and several hundred thousand employees. Vendors would turn up with "cute" web apps that used drop downs to select objects like security groups or user accounts. This works great when you're develop…

> merely clicking something like that will make both the server and client use gigabytes of memory until either one or both crash Curious as to how clicking on an UI object would consume gigabytes of memory, both in frontend and backend?

For large organisations the amount of entries in the dropdown is probably very large. To fill the dropdown would then require significant work on the server, and to build up and show the dropdown would require significant work on the client.

Edit, of course a proper solution would be well-thought out and would not crash, but that solution would also not be using a single dropdown to show all possible values because that is not usable when it is more than 20 entries.

Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#26

Post by rswail »

rmbyrro wrote: post #17
jiggawatts wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IME this part is completely wrong, unless it's defining "serious buyer" in such a way that most of your market isn't one. I used to be such a "serious buyer". I represented a large government agency with over 2,000 sites and several hundred thousand employees. Vendors would turn up with "cute" web apps that used drop downs to select objects like security groups or user accounts. This works great when you're develop…

> merely clicking something like that will make both the server and client use gigabytes of memory until either one or both crash Curious as to how clicking on an UI object would consume gigabytes of memory, both in frontend and backend?

because toy apps that use dropdowns like the OP mentioned will do a "SELECT * FROM security_groups" at the backend (requiring RAM for the whole thing to format the response) and then send it down to the frontend which will then spend eternities formatting the list in the DOM as a complete UL/LI of objects that will blow up the front end.

Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#27

Post by movedx »

smilespray wrote: post #23
CipherThrowaway wrote: post #16

Bit of an arrogant and directionless rant with no concrete detail and many false dichotomies. "Just build the right product" is like saying "just don't write bugs" or "just have money." It feels like DeHaan is reacting to the idea of exploration because he thinks you should just know everything to begin with. Knowing everything upfront is definitely better than exploring your domain, product and market incrementally.…

This wasn't what I got out of the article. Too many people focus on the Minimum, and don't care about the Viable or the Product. There are table stakes. MVP doesn't mean half-assed and buggy. They misuse the concept and release any old crap. As a result, MVP has become too much of a buzzword and the intention behind it got lost.

That doesn't mean the MVP is a bad idea, then. That means it's being poorly implemented.

Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#28

Post by jiggawatts »

rswail wrote: post #26
rmbyrro wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> merely clicking something like that will make both the server and client use gigabytes of memory until either one or both crash Curious as to how clicking on an UI object would consume gigabytes of memory, both in frontend and backend?

because toy apps that use dropdowns like the OP mentioned will do a "SELECT * FROM security_groups" at the backend (requiring RAM for the whole thing to format the response) and then send it down to the frontend which will then spend eternities formatting the list in the DOM as a complete UL/LI of objects that will blow up the front end.

Drop-downs for unconstrained lists are just flat wrong, they become unusable at a mere few hundred entries. Even with just a few thousand, you'll see only a tiny subset of accounts/groups/objects and it'll look like this:

    AADEN
    AADIT
    AADVIK
    AAIDEN
    AARAV
    AARIZ
    AARON
    AARUSH
    AARYAN
    AAYAN
    AAYDEN
    ABDEL
    ABDIEL
    ABDUL
    ABDULLAH
    ...
The rest of the list will be cut off past the bottom of the screen, or have a tiny down-arrow that will scroll down... one... item... at... a... time.

I would do the "look at the server RAM disappear like a magic trick! ...and now the whole server is gone!" demo to really drive the point home, but that happens around the 200K-1M object level (depending on the software).

About 50% of the time there would be a senior developer there who would just slowly blink at me and suggest the "solution" of cutting down the directory to a more manageable size, like 50 users.

Like... yeah buddy. We'll just delete 99.975% of the user accounts in the directory system because you learned programming from a "4 Dummies" book.

Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#29

Post by robertlagrant »

I think this is a bit of a misread of what MVP means. It's not a prototype or a way to search for the right product to build. It's prioritising the minimum set of features to launch a viable product.

That pretty obviously implies that you already know what to build, at least roughly, so that thinking has been done. If you need more than 20 objects and pagination, then that's part of the V in MVP.

The difference is that you don't spend 2 years on 100 features you think people will want (or even, people tell you they want) - you boil that research down to 15 features that can work together as a product that you've defined will be useful, and then build the next set of features on top that will allow you to access more of the market, partly based on what you learned from the previous iteration, etc etc.

You may still spend 2 years building (and you should definitely carve out budget assuming that) and you may still build 100 features, but you launched much earlier to get information, and you may have built 30 features differently due to the extra information you got, and you'll have got a pretty battle-tested product into the market by the end of the two years.

You probably know all this. I'm restating because I read so many articles that confuse an idea with observed (or anecdotal) bad implementations, and this seems to do the same thing.

Re: Minimal Viable Product is old and busted

#30

Post by robertlagrant »

smilespray wrote: post #23
CipherThrowaway wrote: post #16

Bit of an arrogant and directionless rant with no concrete detail and many false dichotomies. "Just build the right product" is like saying "just don't write bugs" or "just have money." It feels like DeHaan is reacting to the idea of exploration because he thinks you should just know everything to begin with. Knowing everything upfront is definitely better than exploring your domain, product and market incrementally.…

This wasn't what I got out of the article. Too many people focus on the Minimum, and don't care about the Viable or the Product. There are table stakes. MVP doesn't mean half-assed and buggy. They misuse the concept and release any old crap. As a result, MVP has become too much of a buzzword and the intention behind it got lost.

This article then serves to increase the misunderstanding, rather than just clarifying what it should mean. Conflating idea and implementation is not good.
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