A Safer-For-Work "MVP" | Hacker News Reader

A Safer-For-Work "MVP"

frankcaron.com

14 pointsfrankcaron5 comments

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?

...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.

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...

And his point is not "do unnecessary work". His point is "in larger organizations with little tolerance for risk and repeated failures, you're better off hitting these points for something that is actually viable, not just minimal"

> 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.

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