My initial proposal was to build it incrementally: tackle the obviously critical functionality to get something working and ship it, then define and implement additional features on an ongoing basis. I had hoped this would fly, since the company talked a big game about being agile.
But no dice. We had to have a complete plan for all the features currently supported (some of them of dubious value, many of them incomplete and inconsistent in specification), and it had to come with a specific timetable. Under protest, the team and I worked hard to produce high-level estimates, and ended up basically guessing that the thing would take six months.
No dice, it had to be delivered in three. I made a suggestion along the lines of the strategy suggested in the article -- we could identify a subset of features that the team would be comfortable could be delivered within the deadline. It would probably be stronger, I argued, since it wasn't clear that all the added weight added much value.
No dice: everything was priority one. I pointed out something like, "you can't fight the laws of physics". I apparently gave the impression that we'd get it done anyway, though my memory of the conversation was that I was sternly disagreeable.
Our team goes ahead and starts implementing items from a value-prioritized backlog. Fast forward three months, and we have a working system that supports the most important use-cases. We considered it past ready to ship, knowing we'd need to keep iterating. The response from management, predictably, was frustration at the missing features, despite the advance warnings.
Management goes into "high-pressure" mode, and for the next three months I do my best to keep the team insulated. After more or less six months of total development time, we finally replace the prior component. All the users agree that it has far fewer bugs. I and many of my team members grumble that it has far too many, on account of the fact that we weren't given the chance to ship the minimum viable product when it was ready.
I'm not really sure what the moral of the story is.