The Maximum, Beautiful Product | Hacker News Reader

The Maximum, Beautiful Product

techcrunch.com

23 pointsiProject11 comments

The operative word for the MVP is "viable". What was viable for Apple with the iPhone was a beautiful touch-UI, amazing hardware, and some native apps built by Apple. It wasn't native apps from 3rd parties (not available until 2008), the fastest processor possible, or the optimal screen size or resolution. They iterated those things.

Minimal and viable mean different things for different projects, but defining and adhering to those are important for everyone.

The problem is that this changes the scope of the word so much as to render it meaningless, since the arguments during meetings just shift to what exactly is "minimally viable."

Which is pricelessly what you should be arguing about: what do we agree is minimally viable for what we're trying to do? If you can't decide that then you can't decide anything.

Embarrassing misspelling of precisely

The whole thing seems like shifting definitions. What startup gets in a room and says they should build things they are unsure they need for product success?

I think as Jobs himself said, the iPhone would have been a successful product if it were simply one of the three products that it was marketed as: the phone, the widescreen iPod, or the "Internet in your pocket." Instead it was all three. In addition to that, they did Maps, Calculator, Calendar, a Camera, Notes, Mail, Stocks, and Weather. And before the damned thing even shipped they managed to get Youtube on there.

I think you'd have to do some pretty cruel and unusual things to the definition of "minimum" to get it to describe iPhone 1.0. That product went way above and beyond what it needed to do to get Apple a foothold in the phone market.

Yea, like what if steve jobs shipped the original iPhone without copy and paste? Oh wait...

Apple was always a balance between perfectionism and "real artists ship", at least from the stories I've heard.

I think the author didn't read Lean Startup - or didn't understand it properly. MVP isn't a product per se, it's a customer discovery process.

His point is that you won't build something past the next local optimum if you overtrain on your customers' immediate actions.

Even "4 steps to the epiphany" began with the vision of the founders. That part of the message seems to get lost in the rhetoric.

I think, whatever adjective you put in in the middle, minimum is always better than maximum. Even if you choose an ambitious word like "iconic," "dominant," or "world-changing," you'll do better to attempt the minimum iconic product than the maximum, because it's always better to do the same thing faster.

Problem with MVP is the loss aversion bias + limited resources that entrepreneurs have - often 'lean' founders choose idea that is close to existing business process \ customer habits or investment trends (this decreases risk to lose) and then 'pivot' changing small things - one thing at a time trying to get the new service. It works well for theatretical improvisation and business improvements, but will not put product away from existing trends. For the same reason, Silicon Valley is sometimes too trendy and short-sighted. Many big ideas emerged outside of the Valley and then came here to 'pivot'

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