> [JO:I agree that they are all goals. My assumption though is that just reaching those goals is not sufficient for success.

I agree with this (and the clarification in the paragraph just after this), but to my mind, those are different goals.

The goal of an MVP is quite different to the goal of refinement - in one you are determining if there is a market, in the other you are determining PMF via successive refinements.

Those would be different headlines, but headlines nonetheless. I see it as H1: "You can now rent VMs through an API" H2: "Rentable VMs available across our entire offering (not just the x2.small)" H3: "Cost-calculator available on our RVMs" H4: "RVM snapshot facility, first of its kind, now available" H5: "RVMs are transferrable between regions with no loss of data"

What you clarify was not something I considered - that each new headline one is working towards is, in fact, a new product. I only considered headline-oriented work in the context of a single product.

I think working towards a headline is a bad idea if the headline is a greenfield development, but a good idea when ensuring that the product is evolving to ideally fit the demands of the market.

> [JO: I disagree. Not all existing systems have so high switching costs that customers will tolerate the system losing data.]

What systems are you thinking off? I've seen ancient tiny MSDOS-based software used well into the late 2000s in spite of poor reliability of the underlying system. I've seen long-lived ERP systems have their bugs worked around by users over a decade.

I mean, right now I consulted on a small company extremely unhappy with their accounting software (quickbooks force-moving everyone to their cloud)) dismiss any notion of using anything else because "The users already know how to use this!"

[EDIT: I only somewhat agree with your points, but I upvoted your comment anyway because the ones I agree with, I feel are good points].