How Do We Keep Our MVP Minimum and Viable?
You’re going to screw up your minimum viable product (MVP). It’s inevitable.
Hi. This is today's article from my new All Access website (formerly Teaching Startup). If you like what I do and you want more of it, this is the place to get it.
https://app.teachingstartup.com/post/how-do-we-keep-our-mvp-minimum-and-viable
This is a bit of a deep dive and raw and gets vague in places. My goal is to keep you from rushing into the MVP process and getting knocked over.
I’m not going to lie to you. No matter how much experience you have, no matter how talented your team is, and no matter how well you know what you’re trying to build and why – you’re going to hork your minimum viable product (MVP).
It’s inevitable. It’s almost because you have to. I’m doing it right now.
Look, I’ve been inventing new products, software and otherwise, for a long, long time, since before MVP was even a thing, and I just ran into these problems again when trying to get an MVP distilled from the ideal, finished, very complex product in our heads.
This is my day job, so it is big. We’re betting the future of the company on it, so it’s real. I’m in the middle of the process right now too, so this should be an especially poignant look at some real world lessons that all entrepreneurs and technologists and innovators need to learn, and then relearn and relearn.
Now, our final product has all the hallmarks of an eventual success, so much so that our sales team is closing deals even faster than their own expectations, which were of course, much faster than my own expectations. Time is of the essence here. Those sales people (led by the CEO), have done an amazing job of properly setting customer expectations for our feature set and delivery timeline, but as it is any time you go the MVP route, the prospects always come up with quirks and tweaks and roadblock-creators that may or may not be deal-breakers. We also have to hit a certain date or we’re screwed.
So we have some hard choices we need to make. And quickly.
But this is why you go MVP in the first place. You know the problem, you’ve got the solution, but there are a lot of moving parts out there in the real world markets, from data you can’t get from some customers, to features that need to work a certain way for a single customer, to assumptions you made that were just plain wrong.
The brass ring is out there for you to grab, you just need to build the carousel and the horse and make the thing spin.
How shitty is that carousel going to be? Well, how much time do you have?
https://app.teachingstartup.com/post/how-do-we-keep-our-mvp-minimum-and-viable