Evolution of Minimum Viable Product
raspasov.posthaven.com
Evolution of Minimum Viable Product
1–10 of 28 posts
Re: Evolution of Minimum Viable Product
#2This really just shows you need people with domain knowledge of whatever you are writing to be on the team whenever you are developing software.
Re: Evolution of Minimum Viable Product
#3> Now think about a bad software product that you might encounter briefly or you are forced to use: a poorly designed electronic kiosk with 1000ms lag on every interaction, or a hospital electronic system. I think there's a high chance that the people building them rarely use them, or not at all.
To be fair, it would be hard for me to build hospital EHR software if I were also checking myself into the hospital every day.
At my former company we built software for enrolling seniors into Medicare. It was as polished as we could possibly make it, but none of the engineers were 65+ and so pretty hard to dogfood.
Re: Evolution of Minimum Viable Product
#4Dogfooding is good but I abide by a different definition of MVP. Minimal describes the feature set (go to market with your differentiators). Viability is determined by the value added by the product relative to the competition. The greater the competition and the less differentiated the product, the more compelling and polished it needs to be viable.
Re: Evolution of Minimum Viable Product
#5I agree 100% that a product is way better off when used actively by the creators and/or those with extremely low-effort access to the creators. It's a bit weird to call it an "improved definition" though. It's more like how to set your MVP up for successful iteration and growth.
Some products (like most of my own side projects) are ONLY ever used by their creator :P.
Re: Evolution of Minimum Viable Product
#6There's a better term for what a MVP should be. MVP implies a minimum set of features you _have_ to develop otherwise users won't touch. The problem is agreeing what this minimum is... in startups that's easier because you have to launch, in big companies the MVP what 13 stakeholders want it to be.
I like Minimum Learning Product, or MLP - what's the minimum you need to launch to start learning? To do user surveys, analytics, get feedback on? You might not even have enough users to really run an A/B test yet, but it captures better the idea of launching small and iterating, anchoring it in listening to your users.
Re: Evolution of Minimum Viable Product
#7Dogfooding is good but I abide by a different definition of MVP. Minimal describes the feature set (go to market with your differentiators). Viability is determined by the value added by the product relative to the competition. The greater the competition and the less differentiated the product, the more compelling and polished it needs to be viable.
viability relative to others is a better lens
Re: Evolution of Minimum Viable Product
#8> Now think about a bad software product that you might encounter briefly or you are forced to use: a poorly designed electronic kiosk with 1000ms lag on every interaction, or a hospital electronic system. I think there's a high chance that the people building them rarely use them, or not at all. To be fair, it would be hard for me to build hospital EHR software if I were also checking myself into the hospital every…
I'm one of those people who take the bright, shiny trinket that engineers love to show off and, after a few moments, make it start oozing a brown, smelly fluid as I find the flaws.
Another area where people don't dog food anywhere near enough is handicapped accessibility. It's a catch-22 situation where people like me can't write code because their hands or eyes don't work correctly, and those who have the physical ability to write code don't use accessibility tools.
Re: Evolution of Minimum Viable Product
#9The problem I see is that investing is happening before even basic demonstrations. Billions of dollars are being given to people who haven't even put together a slide deck.
Worse! We're throwing money at people who haven't done the basics AND experts are highly confident will fail. All while ignoring those with viable prototypes who need money to scale...
But what really gets me is that it's become commonplace to just fake tech demos. Demo is short for "demonstration" not "illustration"! You can do a "this is our vision" and that's fine, but you can't fucking call that a demo. Calling it a demo is a lie. Calling it a vision is not. It really isn't that hard to stay within the ethical lines here
Re: Evolution of Minimum Viable Product
#10The problem I see is that investing is happening before even basic demonstrations. Billions of dollars are being given to people who haven't even put together a slide deck. Worse! We're throwing money at people who haven't done the basics AND experts are highly confident will fail. All while ignoring those with viable prototypes who need money to scale... But what really gets me is that it's become commonplace to jus…
Sir, this is Hacker News.