
Maximum Viable Product - fogus
http://measuringmeasures.com/blog/2010/6/8/maximum-viable-product.html
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jacabado
He lost me here: "A maximum viable product doesn't fail fast - it succeeds
slowly as you iterate toward it with minimum viable products and learn along
the way."

So there's nothing new there, that's what minimum viable product "people" have
been doing. The hard part is to convince some people to follow the fail fast
mantra. Getting passionate with big vision is easy as it is to be provocative
and look innovative being so.

~~~
bradfordcross
Some people won't get on board with fail fast.

Others are on board with fail fast, but they are purely focused on fail fast
and don't get the vision part.

Ever hear people complaining that lot's of modern web companies look more
features than products? Based on my experiences and interactions, that is
primarily due to lack of vision.

Worst of all, some people have no vision and don't get fail fast. They are
missing on both counts.

All I am doing in this post is giving my opinion that both the vision and fail
fast execution are important, and this is the particular way that I think they
fit together.

~~~
ThomPete
I don't think it's a lack of vision. More likely it's a lack of patience and
guts. And a complete confusion about what constitutes a product and what
constitutes features.

It takes patience and guts to focus on the core elements of your product and
see if they have any merit out there. So often people compensate by adding all
the features they envision could be added.

I normally use the hammer [http://000fff.org/wp-
content/uploads/2009/11/product_feature...](http://000fff.org/wp-
content/uploads/2009/11/product_feature1.png) as an analogy for explaining the
difference.

That is at least my experience having worked on so many startups I can't count
them anymore.

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by
Or looked at a slightly different way. We should only build things that
customers want, and they find it very difficult to explain what they want
unless we give them an application to try. When we do give them an application
we will receive conflicting requests, and we have to decide which fit the
product, or whether we can meld them into a more encompassing or strategic
form. Once the customers start giving feedback my thinking is that the
"vision" you talk about should just be our interpretation of what the
customers ask for rather than being independent of them. Or less absolute,
perhaps the proportion of development effort expended on non-customer-
requested changes should be small compared to things which address their
currently stated requirements. I'll stop rambling now ...

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tjmaxal
His idea might be right but calling it a "Maximum viable product" seems to
lead in the wrong direction. MaxVP makes me think of feature bloat not
innovation.

