

A Safer-For-Work "MVP" - frankcaron
http://frankcaron.com/Flogger/?p=5624

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swombat
Unfortunately, this misses the point of the MVP concept, and falls exactly
into the trap that Lean Startup is trying to get you to avoid.

An MVP isn't a crappy product, it's an answer to a question: should I go to
the next step?

Sometimes the next MVP step can be just a button that does nothing. Sometimes
it's a concierge service. Sometimes it's a small bit of functionality and
measurement.

The entire point of this concept is to avoid doing unnecessary work. Building
a product that can eat, shit, fuck and die "out of the gate" is the very
definition of waste - the exact kind of waste that Eric Aries rightly advises
against.

None of those four activities are inherently necessary to serve the purpose of
an MVP, which is not to make money, not to have solid support services, not to
please the user and not (emphatically not) to have a sensible end-of-life plan
for a product that may never even be built! The purpose of an MVP is to answer
a simple question: is it worth going to the next step?

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ebiester
...which is why MVPs are more or less useless within the context of larger
companies.

Larger companies often have that down. They know how to identify a market
need. It is rare that a larger company is going to go into a market that
hasn't already shown some sort of proof.

It is not guaranteed that the public will want _your_ product, but an MVP
isn't going to do much there anyway.

The MVP is for small companies for multiple reasons.

What the article outlines is not a bad first approximation for potential new
products in larger organizations.

~~~
swombat
Are you suggesting that large companies never build products that are useless?
Never launch anything that nobody uses? Never waste effort?

If they do, then perhaps they should focus their development on waste
reduction, rather than prematurely optimise for problems which aren't there
yet, and which may never exist, like end-of-lifing a product that doesn't even
exist yet...

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carbocation
> _Ultimately, building a product that can ESFD out of the gate seems like a
> much more sound goal and a better goalpost—and, importantly, one that
> doesn’t create an argument over what “viable” really means._

It's certainly clear that this (a) isn't minimal, and (b) aims to be viable.
So really it's one classic approach to building a product, discarding the
advice of the Lean Startup movement.

