
The Tyranny of the Minimum Viable Product - rmah
https://medium.com/@jonhpittman/the-tyranny-of-the-minimum-viable-product-fb25e2e57e6e
======
jdietrich
This reads to me like a massive overthinking of a very old problem - bad
products.

We used to have bad products that did a hundred different things badly, rushed
out to meet an overambitious spec sheet and an unrealistic launch date. Now we
have bad products that do one thing badly, rushed out because the Kickstarter
money or seed funding has all been spent.

I think the author completely misses the mark on what these teams are getting
wrong, and the solution to the problem. The products he describes have clearly
had no small amount of effort put into the "whole gestalt experience"; The
hardware he complains about looks beautiful, and I expect came in beautiful
packaging and was sold with beautiful marketing. His gripes are
straightforward engineering issues, mainly of poor software quality. There's
nothing romantic about refactoring and debugging. It doesn't take any sort of
deep philosophical insight to do proper QA.

If I may be somewhat blunt, I think that the answer is perfectly
straightforward - stop buying unproven hardware just because it looks cool.
Companies ship buggy, half-finished devices because the market makes it
profitable to do so. Curb your enthusiasm and wait for version two. Pass over
the hot new thing from the hot new startup, and buy something more pedestrian
from a manufacturer with a proven track record. Ignore the glowing press
reviews on launch day, and wait for the trickle of complaints on Amazon when
the thing starts failing after three months.

~~~
Animats
_" Stop buying unproven hardware just because it looks cool."_

Yes. Remember what happened to Detroit when their quality was inferior to
Japanese cars. Don't deal with companies whose approach is "shit early, shit
often".

And if it doesn't work, return it, demand a refund, and make negative comments
on Amazon.

("Internet Thermometer — needs 4 AAA batteries every week". That's incompetent
electronic design. I have an outdoor thermometer which transmits to a receiver
and display inside. It's been running for seven years now, and it's on its
second pair of two AA batteries.)

~~~
camillomiller
Sometimes it works, if you balance the shit levels. Take Samsung's
smartphones: a couple of flagship models, usually great, balanced by a ton of
mostly shitty mid-tier phones that carriers are happy to bundle with their
equally shitty offers. Works well, if you don't make a misstep like last
year's S5.

~~~
creshal
I wouldn't exactly call Samsung's flagship devices "great" either. Flashy
hardware, but TouchWiz is so absurdly slow and bugged that the UX is worse
than on non-modified Android phones half as expensive.

------
kriro
Seems like a chasm problem. The products are early adopter material but the
expected quality is mainstream. If they are marketed as mainstream products
that's the problem.

I think the exchange battery=wifi reset scale is a good example. An early
adopter will think "weeee my scale can talk to the internet" and then
reconfigure when the battery runs out. It's kind of expected as a trade of for
being one of the first people to have a scale that talks to the internet.
Someone that is more of a mainstream customer will get very annoyed by this
(why doesn't it "just work"). I think the OP is leaning early adopter (clearly
willing to try new stuff) but he expects mainstream quality...that's a common
sign of mismarketed products (oversold the maturity)

The rpoposed solution from browsing the comments here seems to be to "just
make the products better, they are not that good". I tihnk I disagree. The
products as mentioned seem fine as long as they are clearly marketed as early
adopter material. The failure to do so is the problem. It's valuable to
collect that annoyance and improve the product for the mainstream version.

tl;dr: MVP isn't the problem. It's failing to communicate that the product is
more of an MVP than a polished product.

~~~
amirmc
Even early adopters expect the products they use to do the thing advertised. I
don't believe there are many _paying customers_ who'd be happy with, say, a
lighting system that only works half the time.

The main difference from my perspective is that the bar for 'Minimal' _and_
'Viable' in hardware is much higher than for software.

------
AndrewKemendo
This is actually a big problem for emerging tech, not the MVP as concept.
Notice that everything that this guy reviews is IOT/Hardware and not what we
have come to expect of the MVP in form of: landing page and dedicated phone
number for a food delivery service.

The reality is that there are a tiny sliver of people who will agree to be
early adopters of any really new technology. Outside of that, everyone expects
things to be "Apple perfect" right out of the box or they will just abandon
it. I am not saying they are wrong for that, but just stating that as a fact.

In general new technology is not compelling enough on its own to have users
dedicate a lot of time to working around implementation/functional issues.

This is why it is so critical to have some kind of non-revenue funding for
very very new technology, either in the form of Angel/VC for independent
developers or in R&D funds within large organizations.

There is just too long between when a product goes to market to get feedback
until it hits the right notes to be adopted to not be supported by something
other than revenue - and for really hard stuff just being LEAN and cheap
doesn't work.

tl;dr: You can't start Tesla on Pizza and Ramen.

------
beat
In the classic book _Crossing the Chasm_ , Geoffrey Moore divided the early
market for a product into _three_ groups, not two - the technophiles, the
early adopters, and the early majority.

The author of this blog thinks of himself as an early adopter, but he's
actually a technophile - he buys these products not because he needs them or
because they solve actual problems he has, but rather because he collects IoT
gadgets for a hobby. In _Crossing the Chasm_ , Moore basically disregards
technophiles as a market, being too insignificant to support a product.

As I'm prone to saying, what characterizes early adopters is that they have a
problem so frustrating, so confounding, that they will buy a buggy, incomplete
product simply because it solves their problem. This separates them from
technophiles in that they don't _want_ the product, but rather _need_ the
product. This is a little different from Moore's view. Moore argues that early
adopters choose products in order to develop a competitive advantage - they'll
tolerate bugs and incompleteness in order to have an edge over their
competition.

Moore's early majority is a different market - they're not looking for a
competitive advantage, but rather parity. They want to use the same product
their competition uses. That's where the money is, but crossing the chasm from
early adopters to early majority is HARD (hence the name of the book). An
early majority product will need real polish in order to achieve the grace the
blog author wants - no MVPs here! You don't get the early majority market
without something really excellent, something with the classical and romantic
in at least moderate harmony.

But yeah. The problem with the blog author's PoV is that he's not actually an
early adopter. He's not solving problems, except satisfying his hobbyist lust
for the latest tech. So he's picking things up early in the MVP learning
cycle. And frankly, features _do_ outweigh gestalt at that point.

------
evv
The author should check his definition of viability. This doesn't mean the
product is polished or done, it means that people will buy it. And he did buy
it.

Don't call yourself an early-adopter if you aren't willing to accept the
challenges that come with it. Sometimes investing in new products pays off and
you get access to a new technology before the rest of the world discovers it.
Sometimes the product miserably fails and your money is wasted. It comes with
the territory, and nobody should be surprised by it.

~~~
amirmc
What about all the over-hyping that goes on? Or outright false/misleading
advertising? Sometimes you only find out you're an 'early adopter' when the
product's in your hands.

------
hoodoof
These aren't minimum viable products, they just aren't very good.

Minimum viable product is about getting something minimal built to test the
market and see if there is any interest. If there is, you iterate on it to
build out the feature set.

I'm not much for minimum viable product. It's a fine distinction but I build
"minimum valuable product" \- i.e. the product that I think it should be.

~~~
rock_hard
Fully Agree, I literally just published a full blog post to clarify that the
focus of MVPs is not the 'minimal' part but the 'viable'!

[https://medium.com/building-things-people-want/build-mvps-
in...](https://medium.com/building-things-people-want/build-mvps-in-2-months-
or-better-in-10-days-c23d29ecf65e)

~~~
hoodoof
I do know someone whose primary focus is on the minimal part. Not my cup of
tea.

------
speedyapoc
I love the idea of minimum viable products. They can be cheap and effective
for rapidly testing business ideas and getting mass user feedback. However,
one shouldn't confuse an MVP with an alpha or a beta. If you release an MVP,
it should definitely be able to do whatever is "MV", pretty darn well and
reliably.

------
zenogais
To me this is always what MVP has meant. The fact that some products initially
or completely fail at this is, from the product maker's perspective, part of
the feedback loop the MVP is there to establish.

~~~
clay_to_n
Absolutely. He's noticed that new companies seem to be thinking "minimum" is
more important than "viable" \- which it isn't. No point in making an "MVP"
and selling it if it's not actually a working, viable product. But I guess a
lot of the mistakes come down to finances, as he noted.

------
6t6t6
The problem is that the manufacturers know that the consumers will never
complain and will not return the products ever if they are defective.

Also, the minimum warranty should be, at least, 2 years. Any product that is
designed to last less than that, should never be on the market.

~~~
wtetzner
> Also, the minimum warranty should be, at least, 2 years. Any product that is
> designed to last less than that, should never be on the market.

Not even milk?

~~~
6t6t6
¬¬

------
encoderer
I had a recent experience with a Moov fitness tracker that left me feeling
this way. Now I just feel like I've made some sort of wager that they will
roll out enough updates before this thing goes obsolete to make the purchase
-- of TWO of these -- worth while.

(tldr is just that 75% of what they show in their product video, it turns out,
is not actually possible -- "yet")

------
decentrality
This person misunderstood 'viable' entirely. It's viable in that it has an
audience who feels like buying. It's not talking about the quality at all.

------
danenania
The other side of the coin is the company that spent tons of time perfecting
every edge case and didn't get their product to the store shelf, providing you
with nothing to buy and complain about.

Of course consumers want the best possible product with no defects whatsoever,
and businesses should strive for that. But the point of an mvp is that making
difficult choices about which imperfections to accept is often the only way to
give the product any chance at all. Saying 'just do it right' isn't really
helpful. Everyone _wants_ to do it right. The hard part is knowing where to
draw the line when doing it 100% right isn't practical or wise.

------
KFW504
You know what's interesting, there's also the other side of the tech-products
coin where they are designed with a certain lifespan in mind...'designed to
fail' is too harsh, but certain products could be way more sustainable than
they are.

In some ways, I can understand the nobility of an MVP mentality, because it's
theoretically striving for more...but these others, I'm not so sure.

Then again, what do you think the net economic impact is of each of these
tactics? Could be good if you think about it...

------
Lancey
Really the problem here isn't with the concept of a MVP, but with the author's
spending habits. The purpose of a minimum viable product is to test its
feasibility. Purchasing something that's new and fresh should come with the
(implied) disclaimer that it might not work as intended, at least until they
get the kinks out. Buying in early just means you get a head start on all the
frustration that comes with a new gizmo that's really just out there as a
springboard to feel out what consumers want and what direction to take it.

Methinks the author should think twice before impulse buying shitty gadgets,
especially considering how young the IoT is as a concept. There's still a lot
of ground to cover on the idea of IoT itself, and a lot of things that need to
be defined before we start seeing IoT devices as more than novelties and
knick-knacks. Really a case of white people problems right here.

------
ams6110
Maybe trivial household functions just aren't worth automating. Is it so hard
to flip a light switch manually? At least you know it will work.

------
pyvpx
the most pressing comment I have after reading that is "how did the network
damage your camera to the point of being irreparable?"

that sounds like one hell of a denial of service -- firmware damage!

------
marvel_boy
If only for the quote of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" 70's book
this post has my upvote.

------
thekevan
It sounds a little more like the author isn't good at implementing the
concept, and/or has just chosen some bad examples of it.

