I have a confession.
It’s a hard thing to admit in public. Almost heresy.
But it’s true. [Deep breath]
I’ve fallen out of love with the MVP.
In principle, the Minimum Viable Product is great.
But there are (at least) two things wrong with the concept.
1) Almost nobody in the history of MVPs truly keeps it ‘minimum’. There’s always bloat in there. Sometimes massive amounts.
2) ‘Viable’ is an admirable goal. But it’s the second stage.
Teams I work with have adopted a phrase I’ve coined: the super-skinny.
It’s a cousin to the MVP.
But doesn’t have anywhere near as much investment.
But doesn’t have anywhere near as much investment.
It’s also cousin to the proof of concept.
But it’s not throwaway.
It’s the barest bones of a complete end-to-end happy path.
It proves that you can get to the end.
That you can get the job done.
Delivering the super-skinny shows your stakeholders that you can succeed.
Fast.
And protects you from getting 90% of the way there before you run out of funds.
Because 90% still isn’t 100%.
A one-lane bridge that goes all the way across a river works. A six-lane one that only goes 90% across doesn’t.
Once the super-skinny is in the bag, you can move on to the MVP.
Add the various unhappy paths.
The supporting features.
Keep iterating.
As my good friend and colleague, Matthew, says: “Put yourself beyond failure”.
Deliver a super-skinny version first.
* for those not in the software world, the Minimum Viable Product, or MVP, is the smallest, quickest-to-produce bit of software that the market will tolerate.
* for those not in the software world, the Minimum Viable Product, or MVP, is the smallest, quickest-to-produce bit of software that the market will tolerate.
Because it has to be ‘viable’ (that is, work in the real world) it has to include all sorts of extra stuff.
Often stuff that we’ve done a hundred times before but takes time, like user log-ins.
Stuff that that doesn’t help prove the concept.
The super-skinny leaves that until later.
Until after we’ve proved that we can do the really tricky new bit.