The Tyranny of the Minimum Viable Product

https://medium.com/@jonhpittman/the-tyranny-of-the-minimum-viable-product-fb25e2e57e6e

by rmah • 11 years ago

109 35 11 years ago

zenogais• 11 years ago

To me this is always what MVP has meant. The fact that some products initially or completely fail at this is, from the product maker's perspective, part of the feedback loop the MVP is there to establish.

clay_to_n3• 11 years ago

Absolutely. He's noticed that new companies seem to be thinking "minimum" is more important than "viable" - which it isn't. No point in making an "MVP" and selling it if it's not actually a working, viable product. But I guess a lot of the mistakes come down to finances, as he noted.

encoderer• 11 years ago

I had a recent experience with a Moov fitness tracker that left me feeling this way. Now I just feel like I've made some sort of wager that they will roll out enough updates before this thing goes obsolete to make the purchase -- of TWO of these -- worth while.

(tldr is just that 75% of what they show in their product video, it turns out, is not actually possible -- "yet")

jdietrich• 11 years ago

This reads to me like a massive overthinking of a very old problem - bad products.

We used to have bad products that did a hundred different things badly, rushed out to meet an overambitious spec sheet and an unrealistic launch date. Now we have bad products that do one thing badly, rushed out because the Kickstarter money or seed funding has all been spent.

I think the author completely misses the mark on what these teams are getting wrong, and the solution to the problem. The products he describes have clearly had no small amount of effort put into the "whole gestalt experience"; The hardware he complains about looks beautiful, and I expect came in beautiful packaging and was sold with beautiful marketing. His gripes are straightforward engineering issues, mainly of poor software quality. There's nothing romantic about refactoring and debugging. It doesn't take any sort of deep philosophical insight to do proper QA.

If I may be somewhat blunt, I think that the answer is perfectly straightforward - stop buying unproven hardware just because it looks cool. Companies ship buggy, half-finished devices because the market makes it profitable to do so. Curb your enthusiasm and wait for version two. Pass over the hot new thing from the hot new startup, and buy something more pedestrian from a manufacturer with a proven track record. Ignore the glowing press reviews on launch day, and wait for the trickle of complaints on Amazon when the thing starts failing after three months.

clay_to_n3• 11 years ago

He was arguing that these companies got the gestalt / romantic quality right (a positive trend in tech), but that they aren't getting the classic quality right (ie basic working engineering).

I think you're mostly agreeing with him.

rrherr• 11 years ago

The author was arguing the opposite.

Animats• 11 years ago

"Stop buying unproven hardware just because it looks cool."

Yes. Remember what happened to Detroit when their quality was inferior to Japanese cars. Don't deal with companies whose approach is "shit early, shit often".

And if it doesn't work, return it, demand a refund, and make negative comments on Amazon.

("Internet Thermometer — needs 4 AAA batteries every week". That's incompetent electronic design. I have an outdoor thermometer which transmits to a receiver and display inside. It's been running for seven years now, and it's on its second pair of two AA batteries.)

camillomiller• 11 years ago

Sometimes it works, if you balance the shit levels. Take Samsung's smartphones: a couple of flagship models, usually great, balanced by a ton of mostly shitty mid-tier phones that carriers are happy to bundle with their equally shitty offers. Works well, if you don't make a misstep like last year's S5.

belorn• 11 years ago

While your advices might be a acceptable for hardware, I don't find it much help with minimum viable software. Proven software is generally out of date, version two can as easily be much worse than version one, and so called proven track records has numerous examples of people milking the good name of a company or product series.

The only thing a consumer can do to protect themselves is to hope that consumer reviews are correct and not gamed, and that they are still relevant at the time of purchase. This then leads to new problems, as a recent article on HN talked about (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9207855). In particular, a product with many happy reviews but with a small set of negative ones produces doubt, the psychological effect of which pushes consumer to buy less reviewed items.

raverbashing• 11 years ago

"stop buying unproven hardware just because it looks cool"

Does it really need to be said? Yes, it does

90% of the stuff on Kickstarter is crap. And that's already filtering for things that can be produced/shipped.

Of course, experimenting is part of the solution. But most producers have no experience, no expert knowledge (on the domain area AND/OR on the technology). I wouldn't be surprised to find people thinking programming an Arduino is the same as using jQuery. IT IS NOT

Apple 1 was crap. No doubt about it. But it wasn't marketed for the end user. And it was what got Apple to the Apple II and then to further adoption.

And even that wasn't enough. Visicalc did that.

Now, a wireless IOT thermometer that uses AA batteries, that's just stupid.

smellf• 11 years ago

A wireless IOT thermometer that uses AA batteries, that's just stupid.

It's even stupider than that - AAA batteries!

While I 100% agree with you, it's easy to see how the team that did that thermometer got to that insane product - they started out with very conservative power estimates, saw some advantage to having a battery-powered thermometer, and started development. The power requirements skyrocketed, and whatever their original estimates for battery life were (6 months, whatever) went down the drain, but by that point it was too late to redesign all the electronics and mechanicals to accommodate bigger batteries or a power plug. Or, they had already raised money with "battery powered" as their main selling point, so it was the one feature they couldn't axe even if it killed the product.

hoodoof2• 11 years ago

These aren't minimum viable products, they just aren't very good.

Minimum viable product is about getting something minimal built to test the market and see if there is any interest. If there is, you iterate on it to build out the feature set.

I'm not much for minimum viable product. It's a fine distinction but I build "minimum valuable product" - i.e. the product that I think it should be.

rock_hard• 11 years ago

Fully Agree, I literally just published a full blog post to clarify that the focus of MVPs is not the 'minimal' part but the 'viable'!

https://medium.com/building-things-people-want/build-mvps-in...

hoodoof2• 11 years ago

I do know someone whose primary focus is on the minimal part. Not my cup of tea.

evv• 11 years ago

The author should check his definition of viability. This doesn't mean the product is polished or done, it means that people will buy it. And he did buy it.

Don't call yourself an early-adopter if you aren't willing to accept the challenges that come with it. Sometimes investing in new products pays off and you get access to a new technology before the rest of the world discovers it. Sometimes the product miserably fails and your money is wasted. It comes with the territory, and nobody should be surprised by it.

amirmc2• 11 years ago

What about all the over-hyping that goes on? Or outright false/misleading advertising? Sometimes you only find out you're an 'early adopter' when the product's in your hands.

6t6t62• 11 years ago

The problem is that the manufacturers know that the consumers will never complain and will not return the products ever if they are defective.

Also, the minimum warranty should be, at least, 2 years. Any product that is designed to last less than that, should never be on the market.

wtetzner• 11 years ago

Also, the minimum warranty should be, at least, 2 years. Any product that is designed to last less than that, should never be on the market.

Not even milk?

6t6t62• 11 years ago

¬¬

creshal2• 11 years ago

Also, the minimum warranty should be, at least, 2 years.

It is in the EU. People (me included) are still plain too lazy to return products.

ams6110• 11 years ago

Maybe trivial household functions just aren't worth automating. Is it so hard to flip a light switch manually? At least you know it will work.

thekevan• 11 years ago

It sounds a little more like the author isn't good at implementing the concept, and/or has just chosen some bad examples of it.

speedyapoc• 11 years ago

I love the idea of minimum viable products. They can be cheap and effective for rapidly testing business ideas and getting mass user feedback. However, one shouldn't confuse an MVP with an alpha or a beta. If you release an MVP, it should definitely be able to do whatever is "MV", pretty darn well and reliably.

danenania• 11 years ago

The other side of the coin is the company that spent tons of time perfecting every edge case and didn't get their product to the store shelf, providing you with nothing to buy and complain about.

Of course consumers want the best possible product with no defects whatsoever, and businesses should strive for that. But the point of an mvp is that making difficult choices about which imperfections to accept is often the only way to give the product any chance at all. Saying 'just do it right' isn't really helpful. Everyone wants to do it right. The hard part is knowing where to draw the line when doing it 100% right isn't practical or wise.

KFW504• 11 years ago

You know what's interesting, there's also the other side of the tech-products coin where they are designed with a certain lifespan in mind...'designed to fail' is too harsh, but certain products could be way more sustainable than they are.

In some ways, I can understand the nobility of an MVP mentality, because it's theoretically striving for more...but these others, I'm not so sure.

Then again, what do you think the net economic impact is of each of these tactics? Could be good if you think about it...

kriro• 11 years ago

Seems like a chasm problem. The products are early adopter material but the expected quality is mainstream. If they are marketed as mainstream products that's the problem.

I think the exchange battery=wifi reset scale is a good example. An early adopter will think "weeee my scale can talk to the internet" and then reconfigure when the battery runs out. It's kind of expected as a trade of for being one of the first people to have a scale that talks to the internet. Someone that is more of a mainstream customer will get very annoyed by this (why doesn't it "just work"). I think the OP is leaning early adopter (clearly willing to try new stuff) but he expects mainstream quality...that's a common sign of mismarketed products (oversold the maturity)

The rpoposed solution from browsing the comments here seems to be to "just make the products better, they are not that good". I tihnk I disagree. The products as mentioned seem fine as long as they are clearly marketed as early adopter material. The failure to do so is the problem. It's valuable to collect that annoyance and improve the product for the mainstream version.

tl;dr: MVP isn't the problem. It's failing to communicate that the product is more of an MVP than a polished product.

amirmc2• 11 years ago

Even early adopters expect the products they use to do the thing advertised. I don't believe there are many paying customers who'd be happy with, say, a lighting system that only works half the time.

The main difference from my perspective is that the bar for 'Minimal' and 'Viable' in hardware is much higher than for software.

marvel_boy• 11 years ago

If only for the quote of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" 70's book this post has my upvote.

Lancey• 11 years ago

Really the problem here isn't with the concept of a MVP, but with the author's spending habits. The purpose of a minimum viable product is to test its feasibility. Purchasing something that's new and fresh should come with the (implied) disclaimer that it might not work as intended, at least until they get the kinks out. Buying in early just means you get a head start on all the frustration that comes with a new gizmo that's really just out there as a springboard to feel out what consumers want and what direction to take it.

Methinks the author should think twice before impulse buying shitty gadgets, especially considering how young the IoT is as a concept. There's still a lot of ground to cover on the idea of IoT itself, and a lot of things that need to be defined before we start seeing IoT devices as more than novelties and knick-knacks. Really a case of white people problems right here.

pyvpx• 11 years ago

the most pressing comment I have after reading that is "how did the network damage your camera to the point of being irreparable?"

that sounds like one hell of a denial of service -- firmware damage!

decentrality• 11 years ago

This person misunderstood 'viable' entirely. It's viable in that it has an audience who feels like buying. It's not talking about the quality at all.

AndrewKemendo• 11 years ago

This is actually a big problem for emerging tech, not the MVP as concept. Notice that everything that this guy reviews is IOT/Hardware and not what we have come to expect of the MVP in form of: landing page and dedicated phone number for a food delivery service.

The reality is that there are a tiny sliver of people who will agree to be early adopters of any really new technology. Outside of that, everyone expects things to be "Apple perfect" right out of the box or they will just abandon it. I am not saying they are wrong for that, but just stating that as a fact.

In general new technology is not compelling enough on its own to have users dedicate a lot of time to working around implementation/functional issues.

This is why it is so critical to have some kind of non-revenue funding for very very new technology, either in the form of Angel/VC for independent developers or in R&D funds within large organizations.

There is just too long between when a product goes to market to get feedback until it hits the right notes to be adopted to not be supported by something other than revenue - and for really hard stuff just being LEAN and cheap doesn't work.

tl;dr: You can't start Tesla on Pizza and Ramen.

beat• 11 years ago

In the classic book Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore divided the early market for a product into three groups, not two - the technophiles, the early adopters, and the early majority.

The author of this blog thinks of himself as an early adopter, but he's actually a technophile - he buys these products not because he needs them or because they solve actual problems he has, but rather because he collects IoT gadgets for a hobby. In Crossing the Chasm, Moore basically disregards technophiles as a market, being too insignificant to support a product.

As I'm prone to saying, what characterizes early adopters is that they have a problem so frustrating, so confounding, that they will buy a buggy, incomplete product simply because it solves their problem. This separates them from technophiles in that they don't want the product, but rather need the product. This is a little different from Moore's view. Moore argues that early adopters choose products in order to develop a competitive advantage - they'll tolerate bugs and incompleteness in order to have an edge over their competition.

Moore's early majority is a different market - they're not looking for a competitive advantage, but rather parity. They want to use the same product their competition uses. That's where the money is, but crossing the chasm from early adopters to early majority is HARD (hence the name of the book). An early majority product will need real polish in order to achieve the grace the blog author wants - no MVPs here! You don't get the early majority market without something really excellent, something with the classical and romantic in at least moderate harmony.

But yeah. The problem with the blog author's PoV is that he's not actually an early adopter. He's not solving problems, except satisfying his hobbyist lust for the latest tech. So he's picking things up early in the MVP learning cycle. And frankly, features do outweigh gestalt at that point.

The Tyranny of the Minimum Viable Product

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