It's called “Ship” not “Shit”
blog.heyimcat.com
It's called “Ship” not “Shit”
1–10 of 23 posts
Re: It's called “Ship” not “Shit”
#2Is this really a problem in the design/startup community or does it just appear to be so as judged by the loudest bunch? I'm not in the community so maybe I'm just not exposed to it directly, but these criticisms are awfully similar to what was happening before the first DotCom bust.
Re: It's called “Ship” not “Shit”
#3This reminds me of my workplace.Unfortunately at my work-place people tend to confuse MVP with agile and TDD and then let all the bugs fly around pre-production and viola we go live with known bugs all around and hence depreciating customer confidence.
Quality is often overlooked here, b/c someone else proved that it can be done in 20 days and everyone wants it done in the same 20-days ,no-matter how bad the product goes out of shape :)
With time, this pattern only seems to worsen as there is less money being made day-by-day!
Re: It's called “Ship” not “Shit”
#4Is this really a problem in the design/startup community or does it just appear to be so as judged by the loudest bunch? I'm not in the community so maybe I'm just not exposed to it directly, but these criticisms are awfully similar to what was happening before the first DotCom bust.
There is really and truly a problem. I've worked full-time for several start-ups (I'm working full-time for one now) as well as consulted for several more. I've also networked with a lot of startup founders and know many other people in the industry. From my limited experience it seems endemic - the kinds of people who flock to this apparently easy money are the kinds of people solely focused on winning the startup lotto quick. Not the kind of people focused on building good businesses. This means you get all sorts of short-sighted approaches to things. When those are inevitably frustrated by complicated realities (eg. when business isn't as easy as people were led to believe by movies and books) you then see founders/managers scramble to justify these bad practices. I've watched companies loop like this until all their funding went down the drain and then the founders go and do it again somewhere else. It's one of the big myths that needs to get busted - Adam and Jamie we need you! I'm trying to do my small part on the daily.
Re: It's called “Ship” not “Shit”
#5MVP is about cutting out non critical features, not quality. Without the quality you just end up being slower at iterating and the whole process falls apart.
Re: It's called “Ship” not “Shit”
#6Is this really a problem in the design/startup community or does it just appear to be so as judged by the loudest bunch? I'm not in the community so maybe I'm just not exposed to it directly, but these criticisms are awfully similar to what was happening before the first DotCom bust.
There is really and truly a problem. I've worked full-time for several start-ups (I'm working full-time for one now) as well as consulted for several more. I've also networked with a lot of startup founders and know many other people in the industry. From my limited experience it seems endemic - the kinds of people who flock to this apparently easy money are the kinds of people solely focused on winning the startup l…
It sounds like people are trying to built something that just good enough to be bought by Facebook, Google, Microsoft or Yahoo so they can bailout, perhaps give a few talks and may rake in a few thousand Twitter followers.
Re: It's called “Ship” not “Shit”
#7MVP is about cutting out non critical features, not quality. Without the quality you just end up being slower at iterating and the whole process falls apart.
But it ends up cutting out on quality, because people are used to put up with quite a big amount of crap. If it weren't the case, a whole great deal of business models wouldn't ever panned out.
Re: It's called “Ship” not “Shit”
#8The one thing people seem to forget: MVPs are supposed to be experiments. You do an MVP to figure out whether it's worth your time to build a product for a particular market (i.e. whether there is "product-market fit"), or whether you should pivot to something else. You make them minimal so you can afford to do more of them, because it's unlikely your first one will work. You make them viable because, if they aren't, your experiment won't tell you anything (people won't use it, even if they need what it does.)
If you already know your product is something people want (e.g. something a bank would just give you a business loan for), you obviously don't need to do an MVP, because there's already product-market fit. Starting a pizzeria? Front-load your investment and make a really great pizzeria; buy huge ovens, etc.
If there's literally nobody serving your market, such that it's unclear whether it's even a "need" or not—please don't spend years building the perfect solution to the "problem." Find out if it's a problem first. Build a prototype. Show it to people. Get them to say they're willing to pay you for it. That's what an MVP is.
(And, as soon as you've found your product-market fit, and decided which product you're going to build? Stop thinking of that product as an MVP. It's a real product now: make it good.)
Re: It's called “Ship” not “Shit”
#9I remember reading once that part of Apple’s success was owed to their shunning of lean principles, that they only ever ship complete, mature products. I would say that couldn’t be further from the truth: the original iPhone was about as minimum-viable as a category-defining hardware product could be.
It did only a few things (web browsing, media playback, email) better than anything else on the market, and left out nearly everything else that wasn’t critical to that core functionality (Exchange support, software ecosystem, copy and paste). If anything, the original iPhone was a demonstration of lean principles applied extraordinarily well: A bare minimum of functionality executed at eye-poppingly maximum quality.
Re: It's called “Ship” not “Shit”
#10I remember reading once that part of Apple’s success was owed to their shunning of lean principles, that they only ever ship complete, mature products. I would say that couldn’t be further from the truth: the original iPhone was about as minimum-viable as a category-defining hardware product could be. It did only a few things (web browsing, media playback, email) better than anything else on the market, and left out…
The difference with Apple is that even when they do minimum, they polish that minimum offering very well. I know exactly the kind of stuff the article author is talking about, and most of it undercuts whatever ideas are being tried out.