Pawel Brodzinski on Leadership in Technology

Whatever it takes to lead a team, build a product, and run a business

Tag: mvp

  • Value of MVP and Knowledge Discovery Process

    By now Minimal Viable Product (MVP) is for me mostly a buzzword. While I’m a huge fan of the idea since I learned it from Lean Startup, these days I feel like one can label anything an MVP.

    Given that Lunar Logic is a web software shop we often talk with startups that want to build their product. I think I can recall one or maybe two ideas that were really minimal in a way that they would validate a hypothesis and yet require least work to build. A normal case is when I can easily figure out a way of validating a hypothesis without building a half or even two thirds of an initial “MVP”.

    With enough understanding of business environment it’s fairly easy to go even further than that, i.e. cut down even more features and still get the idea (in)validated.

    A prevalent approach is still to build fairly feature-rich app that covers a bunch of typical scenarios that we think customers would expect. The problem is it means thinking in terms of features not in terms of customer’s problems.

    Given that Lunar is around for quite a long time – it’s going to be the 11th birthday this year – we also have a good sample of data how successful these early products are. Note, I’m focusing here more on whether an early version of a product survived, rather than whether it was a good business idea in the first place.

    Roughly 90% of apps we built are not online anymore. It doesn’t mean that all these business ideas weren’t successes. Some eventually evolved away from the original code base. Others ended up making their owners rich after they sold the product to e.g. Facebook. The reasons vary. Vast majority simply didn’t make the cut though.

    From that perspective, the only purpose these products served was knowledge discovery. We learned more about business context. We learned more about real problems of customers and their willingness to pay for solving them. We learned that specific assumptions we’d had were completely wrong and others were right on spot.

    In short, we acquired information.

    In fact, we bought it, paying for building the app.

    This is a perspective I’d like our potential clients to have whenever we’re discussing a new product. Of course we can build something that will cost 50 thousand bucks and only then release it and figure out what happens. Or maybe, we can figure out how to buy the same knowledge for much less.

    There are two consequences of such approach.

    One is that most likely there will be a much cheaper way to validate assumptions than building the app. The other is that we introduce one more intermediate step before deciding to build something.

    The step is answering how much knowing a specific thing is worth for us. How much would we pay to know whether our business idea would work or not. This also boils down to: how much it will be worth if it plays out.

    I can give you an example. When we were figuring out whether our no estimation cards make sense as a business idea we discussed the numbers. How much we may charge for a deck. What volumes we can think of. The end result of that discussion was that we figured that potential business outcomes don’t even justify turning the cards into a product on its own.

    esimtaion cards

    We simply abandoned the productization experiment as the cost of learning how much we could earn selling the cards was bigger that potential gain. Validating such a hypothesis wasn’t economically sensible.

    By the way, eventually we ended up building the site and made our awesome cards available but with a very different hypothesis in mind.

    In this case it wasn’t about defining what is a Minimal Viable Product. It was rather about figuring out how much potential new knowledge is worth and how much we’d need to invest to learn that knowledge. The economic equation didn’t work initially so we put any effort on hold till we pivoted the idea.

    If we turned that into a simple puzzle it would be obvious. Imagine that I have 2 envelopes. There is a hundred dollar bill inside one and the other is empty. How much would you be willing to pay for information where is the money? Well, mathematically speaking no more than 50 dollars. That’s simple.

    If only we could have such a discussion about every feature that we build in our products we would add much less waste to software. Same thing is true for products.

    Next time someone mentions an MVP you may ask what hypothesis they’re going to validate with the MVP and how much validating that hypothesis is worth. Only then a discussion about the cost of building the actual thing will have enough context.

    By the way the more unsure about the outcomes of validating the hypothesis they are the more valuable the actual experiment will be.

    And yes, employing such attitude does mean that many of what people call MVPs wouldn’t be built at all. And yes, I just said that we commonly encourage our potential clients to send us much less work than they initially want. And yes, it does mean that we get less money building these products.

    And no, I don’t think it affect the financial bottom line of the business. We end up being recommended for our Lean approach and taking care of best interest of our clients. It is a win-win.

  • Minimal Indispensable Feature Set

    Minimal Viable Product (MVP) is such a nice idea. Let’s build something that is as small as possible and at the same time viable, which translates to “provides value and thus make sense to build it.” Two adjectives in a mix where one counterbalances the other and vice versa.

    Since I currently run a web software house I hear the term MVP very frequently. Or to be precise I hear the term MVP being abused very frequently. On some occasion the viable part would be ignored. Much more frequently though the way people understand MVP has virtually nothing to do with the minimal part.

    During the early discussions about products our potential clients want to build I would typically ask about a business case behind a project or an app. It’s not about what it is that someone wants to build. It’s about why it is worth building that thing in the first place.

    Note, I’m not judgmental. We contributed to better or worse ideas but I don’t reserve the right to know what’s worth building and what’s not. In fact, my questions have a very different purpose. What I want to achieve is to learn the value behind the app so that we can have a meaningful discussion about stuff in a backlog.

    Now, this is the part where typically I’d really like to have people read Lean Startup before they are even allowed to talk to any software shop about building their product. And then, read it once again to understand what they are reading in depth.

    The reason is that most of the time I can instantly come up with a batch of work that is one third, one fifth or one tenth of what was labelled an Minimal Viable Product by a potential client and it would still validate a business hypothesis behind a product. It likely means that with a bit of effort and better understanding of the context our clients would be able to cut it down way further than that. It may mean that they’d be even able to validate the basic idea without writing any software at all.

    These so called “MVPs” wouldn’t recognize a real Minimal Viable Product even if it kicked them in the butt.

    A sad part is that most of the time discussion around what really is minimal is futile. While I can provide my insight and encourage to learn more about the topic an argument often boils down to “we really need to build it all because, well, we don’t believe anything short of that would work.”

    The long story short, I believe that MVP is in the top 5 most abused terms in our industry. By now referring to MVP is mostly meaningless unless you ask a series of questions to understand what one means by that. We could have skipped he MVP part, have the same discussion and we’d save a little bit of time.

    That’s why I believe we need another frame for discussing what the initial increment of a product is.

    What I caught myself on a number of times was proposing our clients a different constraint. Let’s step aside from discussing what is minimal and what is viable. Let’s figure out which features will be the part of the product in every single, even most crazy, scenario that we can think of. And I really mean every single one of them.

    What I try to achieve with this discussion is to find the set of features that is a common denominator for all the options of building the product. There’s always something like that. A core process that the app support. A basic idea that the app is built upon. An ultimate issue that the app attempts to solve.

    What I don’t expect is to see the full solution, even the most basic one. It would be an MVP on its own and we’d be back to the square one. What I expect is just a bunch of bits and pieces that are required to eventually build the app.

    It is neither minimal nor viable.

    It is indispensable though.

    There are a couple of reasons to do that. The first one is that it reframes how both parties, the client and us, think of a product. We don’t try to settle on what is viable and what is minimal. We simply go with something that we know will be useful.

    The other one is that it addresses the huge challenge of building a relationship. In fact this part goes really deep. It typically starts with a question how much building something would take. Some sort of an estimate. Well, it’s another thread. I’m not fundamentally against the estimates and see value in understanding generally how much something would take. At the same time I acknowledge that humans are simply not well equipped to estimate as we can’t learn to assess stuff in abstract measures. At the end of the day though, the smaller the batch size of work the smaller the potential risk and the smaller the estimation mistake.

    In other words the smaller the initial batch of work the easier it is to start working.

    It is true from another perspective as well. The most important modifiers of the cost of building a product in a client-vendor scenario isn’t anything related to the product itself. It is the quality of collaboration. It’s about both parties feeling like they’re the part of the same team. It’s about short feedback loops. It’s about working together toward the goal.

    Unless it is about lack of transparency, distrust, and exploiting the other party.

    The tricky part here is that you don’t know where at this spectrum you are until you start working. Building the smallest possible batch of work together pretty much gives you all the knowledge you needed. Seriously, you don’t need more than just few weeks to get a good feeling where collaboration part is going.

    That’s why this the idea of Minimal Indispensable Feature Set is so useful whenever more than a single party is involved in building a product.

    Minimal Indispensable Feature Set is perfectly aligned with building an MVP. In fact it is a subset of an MVP. At the same time it addresses the part of the setup that goes way beyond simply defining of what product is.

    We live in a world where more and more frequently the building part is outsourced to another party. Getting the collaboration right at least as critical as getting the product idea right.

  • MVP Thinking

    One of the most valuable goals achieved by Eric Ries’ Lean Startup is popularizing the term Minimal Viable Product (MVP). Of course the concept isn’t novel. We were using the Minimal Marketable Feature (MMF) idea back in the early days of Kanban and it was coined based on the same way of thinking. There are more of such concepts too.

    The basic premise is that we should build the smallest possible thing or run the smallest possible experiment that is still reasonable and adds value. Depending on the context the value may be something that helps users, but may as well be just knowledge discovery or verification a hypothesis.

    One thing I’ve realized recently is how widely I apply this thinking. Initially, it was simply the way of breaking the scope down. I wanted my teams to build possibly small, but still valuable, chunks of software so a client can verify them and feed us back with useful information. Then, after Lean Startup, it was about running a product. What we want to build something new that kicks butts. What is the smallest feature that can prove or disprove the hypothesis that it would work at all?

    Somehow I now use the same way of thinking, MVP thinking if you will, to discuss marketing ideas, define actionable items during retrospectives, etc. Often it is difficult to define a product per se, but there always is some kind of an expected outcome and definable minimal effort allowing the get that outcome.

    So how would I define MVP thinking?

    1. Define the next smallest valuable goal you want to achieve.
    2. Define minimal effort that allows you to achieve that goal.
    3. Execute.
    4. Analyze the outcomes and learn.
    5. Repeat.

    A potentially tricky part here is defining the goal because it is totally contextual. It is also something that really appeals to me as I don’t like recipes. In fact, if there is anything new here it is basically extremely broad application of the pattern as the idea itself is anything but new. I mean, we usually close our context to working with the scope of a project, driving a product, running a business, etc. Then, we absolutely coin a new term and if it works we make our careers as overpriced consultants.

    That’s totally not my goal. I’m just trying to broaden an applicable context of ideas we already know as I’ve personally found it helpful.

    So if my problem is a roof leaking near a roof window my next minimal goal may be verifying whether the leakage has anything to do with an external window blind. Such a goal is nice because minimal effort may mean simply waiting for the next rain with the blind either opened or closed. I definitely don’t rush to repair the roof.

    Talking about marketing? Let’s set a general goal that, say, TechCrunch will cover us. What would be the smallest valuable experiment that can bring us closer to achieving this kind of a goal? I guess reaching out and networking may be a very reasonable first step. It doesn’t even require having an idea, let alone a product, that we want to have covered.

    How about a product? Well, this one was covered virtually everywhere. Building minimal functionality, possibly even fake, that allows verifying that the idea for the product makes sense.

    Retrospectives? What is a single, smallest possible, change that will have a positive impact on the team? Try it. Verify it. Repeat.

    Heck, I even buy my sailing gear this way. What is the smallest possible set that allows reasonable survival? Then I use the outcome and iterate, e.g. next time I need new gloves, long johns and waterproof case for a phone.

    When you think about that it is basically Kaizen – systematically running small improvement experiments everywhere. So yes, it’s nothing new. It’s just the specific idea of Minimal Viable Product that spoke to me personally and gave me a nice constraint that can be used in different areas of my life.

    By the way, despite it very open definition I also find Kaizen usually applied in a very limited context. So no matter which idea works for you, just remember you can use it in broader context.