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Comment by rickmode | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised by the negative comments here. The idea of shipping a minimum viable product should resonate well with startup-minded folks. I believe PG himself once said if your project will take longer than 3 months to ship, it's too long.

6 months is a good target. It'll keep new projects lean and focused. It should sway the balance of power more to engineering while forcing the business-side / product management to work tightly with engineering... Or force the product managers to take a back seat for the initial release of a project.

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It's not the idea of shipping in six months, it's the idea of shipping something (in six months0 that will be adopted by millions of users.

We don't have the full context of her statement, and I'm guessing (hoping) that she isn't expecting version 1 to be a runaway success, but will allow the team to continue iterating and pivoting, if necessary, before making the determination of whether the project was worthwhile.

I didn't read the quote that way and don't think it's unreasonable to launch an MVP in six months. The other two criteria are business cases against starting and are used to decide which projects should proceed towards their MVPs.

When Google launches a beta (or even alpha), they watch for adoption and "hockey stick" growth. If a project gains traction, the MVP will be augmented with features during the 2-3 years it takes to reach 100M users or $100M.

I agree. My rule of thumb is that you need to shrink a project down into 3 month deliverables. If you aren't going to deliver something that stands alone and is useful in 3 months, then don't bother as the world will likely change before you finish. I realize that some big projects and products take much longer than 3 months start-to-finish but there should always be 100% useful milestones every 3 months.

A startup spending their first three years without shipping a product ("shipping") would be more of a problem than something with Yahoo's stability making something over several years. The risk is much, much lower.

Eventually it is not.

Eventually your products, your development capacity and feel for the customers needs now is so out of touch, you cannot get back.

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