Minimum Viable Product

These days I find myself switching between multiple audio books.  I don’t seem to settle on one and read it through.  I keep feeling like a bee that wandered into a bed of flowers.  I feel the bee’s intoxication.

One of the audio books I wandered into is Eric Ries’s The Lean Startup.

In that book, he discusses a counterintuitive idea of developing a minimum viable product.  

Our world is in constant flux.  For startups it does not make sense to hedge their bet on long term product development.  It is better to develop a product without bells and whistles, or a minimum viable product.  Who knows, you can make your luck that way.

As an example, he cites avatars that his group was trying to develop.  They wanted the avatars to do things like move around screens and jump over obstacles.  In other words, they wanted them to do what characters in The Sims did on a screen.

Eric and his group did not have the resources to pull such a feat.  Instead, they deployed a minimum viable product of their own.

They designed their avatars to ‘teleport’ to an area of the screen the users click.  They released their product, feeling like imposters.

To their surprise, however, their avatars were considered advanced since they teleport.  The resource constrained product garnered favorable view from the users.  Their courage to ship and learn from experience was rewarded handsomely.

That encourages me to view my blogs as minimum viable products so long as I put decent work ethic behind them.