
Alternative to the MVP: Simple, Lovable and Complete - rmason
https://blog.asmartbear.com/slc.html
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hliyan
Oddly enough, this has always been my understanding of the word MVP - simple
but complete. I'd be surprised if there good engineers who make the mistake
mentioned in the article.

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williamscales
Yeah, for me "viable" has always meant complete, worth selling as a product.

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hitgeek
"MVPs are too M and almost never V"

yes, viable is the hard part. just like "loveable" will be the hard part of
SLC.

next month's article. "SLCs make me SC(sick)"

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pfranz
Admittedly I've never worked at a startup. I've always taken MVPs as a
releasable proof of concept. Reminiscent of the "tracer bullets" discussed int
The Pragmatic Programmer.

If you're trying to prove a market, yeah, an MVP would look like the
skateboard -> car image. If you're trying to prove a technology, it would look
like an internal combustion engine strapped to some tires. If it was a
passenger vehicle, it would look like a carriage with some engineers pulling
it with ropes like horses. The "Not like this" looks like a poor
implementation of "waterfall."

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tluyben2
Big corps have departments doing MVPs these days, no need to be a startup.

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daleco
Unfortunately, some (big co) use it as a buzz word and rarely go back to
iterate on the MVP. Just make it as inexpensive as possible, it feels like a
cheap version of watergile.

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im_down_w_otp
We were often badly abusing all three terms: minimum, viable, and product.
Probably that last one most egregiously.

So I put a moratorium on that terminology both internally and in our external
communication. Now we use "Minimum Viable Experiment". Because it implies that
we've established a stable hypothesis, that we've considered what a test and
validation plan should look like, established completion criteria, and nobody
starts prematurely projecting expectations of sales onto an experiment.

The product discovery and development processes are entirely outside that
experimentation process. Though one clearly feeds it and the other is fed by
it.

This has been very successful in keeping expectations aligned and in check
consistently internally, externally, and with our investors/board. Even just
making the change in language forced a conversation to explain it and that by
itself was worth the small shift in terms.

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SomeStupidPoint
This just seems like nothing but fluff:

Simple = Minimum

Complete = Product

Lovable = Viable

People (including me!) just suck at knowing what an MVP is, and tend to
release 2-3 connected MVPs at once.

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asdfpoiu10
Yes but its hard to plug your company by saying: "we do X like everyone else,
but trust me: we have this" but easy with: "we don't do X, we do X' because
these bad things happen with X".

Particularly if X, or things that have been labeled X have been cause for
concern.

Such trival considerations as X' == X don't always get the attention they
deserve, as seeing this requires an amount of understanding of the problem and
not just the fustrations of using X.

*insert generic engineer gripe at how common it is that the people making the purchasing decisions - the target of marketing - don't have said amount of insight.

tl;dr: yup pure fluff

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pbiggar
> But no customer wants to use an unfinished product that the creators are
> embarrassed by. Customers want great products they can use now.

The reason MVPs are so valuable is the word "viable". If your customers truly
demand "great products they can use now", then that's what viable means for
that customer group.

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stephengillie
> _Startups are encouraged by the great Reid Hoffman to “launch early enough
> that you’re embarrassed by your v1.0 release.” But no customer wants to use
> an unfinished product that the creators are embarrassed by._

The article is a response to famous startup advice, continuing the
conversation of just how "minimal" should be an MVP.

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blizkreeg
I like the lovable (or as someone said in the comments, compelling) part.

Thinking of customer development, would it still be risky to build an SLC and
then validate your hypothesis? Presumably, since you've focused on both
lovability and complete-ness, it won't just be a figment of your imagination?

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frigen
It's semantics and all about how you interpret MVP.

My MVPs typically are pretty much complete applications. I can't see it being
any less whilst still being new and innovative.

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purplezooey
The Google Docs example is not a good one because Google had millions of users
already at the time.

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goblin89
In other words bake not a subset of a cake, but a smaller cake.

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nerdponx
I heard a variation of this once: an MVP for a car is a skateboard, not 4
wheels and an undercarriage.

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goblin89
Found where I saw the cake analogy specifically:
[https://blog.intercom.com/start-with-a-
cupcake/](https://blog.intercom.com/start-with-a-cupcake/)

