[HN Gopher] Evolution of Minimum Viable Product
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Evolution of Minimum Viable Product
Author : johnxie
Score : 22 points
Date : 2025-07-02 18:51 UTC (4 hours ago)
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| daft_pink wrote:
| This really just shows you need people with domain knowledge of
| whatever you are writing to be on the team whenever you are
| developing software.
| themanmaran wrote:
| > Now think about a bad software product that you might encounter
| briefly or you are forced to use: a poorly designed electronic
| kiosk with 1000ms lag on every interaction, or a hospital
| electronic system. I think there's a high chance that the people
| building them rarely use them, or not at all.
|
| To be fair, it would be hard for me to build hospital EHR
| software if I were also checking myself into the hospital every
| day.
|
| At my former company we built software for enrolling seniors into
| Medicare. It was as polished as we could possibly make it, but
| none of the engineers were 65+ and so pretty hard to dogfood.
| rickydroll wrote:
| I'm one of those people who take the bright, shiny trinket that
| engineers love to show off and, after a few moments, make it
| start oozing a brown, smelly fluid as I find the flaws.
|
| Another area where people don't dog food anywhere near enough
| is handicapped accessibility. It's a catch-22 situation where
| people like me can't write code because their hands or eyes
| don't work correctly, and those who have the physical ability
| to write code don't use accessibility tools.
| esafak wrote:
| Dogfooding is good but I abide by a different definition of MVP.
| Minimal describes the feature set (go to market with your
| differentiators). Viability is determined by the value added by
| the product relative to the competition. The greater the
| competition and the less differentiated the product, the more
| compelling and polished it needs to be viable.
| 4b11b4 wrote:
| viability relative to others is a better lens
| jasonthorsness wrote:
| I agree 100% that a product is way better off when used actively
| by the creators and/or those with extremely low-effort access to
| the creators. It's a bit weird to call it an "improved
| definition" though. It's more like how to set your MVP up for
| successful iteration and growth.
|
| Some products (like most of my own side projects) are ONLY ever
| used by their creator :P.
| inerte wrote:
| There's a better term for what a MVP should be. MVP implies a
| minimum set of features you _have_ to develop otherwise users
| won't touch. The problem is agreeing what this minimum is... in
| startups that's easier because you have to launch, in big
| companies the MVP what 13 stakeholders want it to be.
|
| I like Minimum Learning Product, or MLP - what's the minimum you
| need to launch to start learning? To do user surveys, analytics,
| get feedback on? You might not even have enough users to really
| run an A/B test yet, but it captures better the idea of launching
| small and iterating, anchoring it in listening to your users.
| godelski wrote:
| The problem I see is that investing is happening before even
| basic demonstrations. Billions of dollars are being given to
| people who haven't even put together a slide deck.
|
| Worse! We're throwing money at people who haven't done the basics
| AND experts are highly confident will fail. All while ignoring
| those with viable prototypes who need money to scale...
|
| But what really gets me is that it's become commonplace to just
| fake tech demos. Demo is short for "demonstration" not
| "illustration"! You can do a "this is our vision" and that's
| fine, but you can't fucking call that a demo. Calling it a demo
| is a lie. Calling it a vision is not. It really isn't that hard
| to stay within the ethical lines here
| turbofreak wrote:
| Sir, this is Hacker News.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| A fool and his money are soon parted.
| jbs789 wrote:
| My perspective is more as a small business founder creating an
| app to solve real world problems in a small market, rather than a
| VC/Silicon Valley. (So I don't know for sure how my views stack
| with "conventional" business wisdom. Maybe smarter people
| disagree.)
|
| I observe or believe that an MVP (product and strategy) exists in
| the context of the current time and marketplace, with a view to
| figuring out how the customer responds to it, so has evolved over
| time as the customer expectations have matured.
| nico wrote:
| > An early, basic version of a product (such as a piece of
| technology, a computer program, etc.) which meets the minimum
| necessary requirements for use by its creators and customers
|
| The keyword here is _customers_
|
| If you are building something for others, which you expect to
| make money from, then you should probably be thinking about a
| Minimum Sellable Product - what is the most basic product that a
| very specific target user or group of target users, will pay for.
| Or at the very least the target users must be willing (and
| ideally eager) to use the product "for real" (eg. for work or
| daily personal use)
|
| This means your MVP or MSP, could very well be just a
| spreadsheet, or a basic document, as long as it's clearly
| targeting specific people who want/need to use it
| ozim wrote:
| Huh?
|
| I have seen the worst imaginable software UX used and cherished
| by people when it was doing the job.
|
| I have seen great UI/UX go away as people did not handle it.
| kwanbix wrote:
| 100%. I have also seen software used and hated (sap?
| salesforce? even jira?) because they were first in their niche
| or because who knows why.
| DantesKite wrote:
| The best mental model of MVP I have found is that it is in some
| sense a science experiment and you're trying to test a specific
| hypothesis as efficiently as possible with the resources you
| have, because you ultimately don't know what's going to work.
| Sparkyte wrote:
| A minimum viable product that is very large and takes years to
| get out is just scope creep disguised as minimum viable product.
|
| Minimum viable product used to mean, "What do we build that hooks
| a customer immediately?". It is about getting them engaged and
| learning from their engagement to then build features onto the
| MVP.
| egypturnash wrote:
| > Now think about a bad software product that you might encounter
| briefly or you are _forced_ to use: a poorly designed electronic
| kiosk with 1000ms lag on every interaction, or a hospital
| electronic system. I think there 's a high chance that the people
| building them rarely use them, or not at all.
|
| _looks at Adobe Illustrator_
|
| _picks up the manual for Creature House Expression, a 2003
| natural media vector editor just oozing with better and more
| thoughtful implementations of things Illustrator still barely
| does, bought by Microsoft and killed_
|
| _sighs_
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| There's also the concept of Minimum _Lovable_ Product.
|
| The first iphone for example, was very barebones: slow EDGE
| internet, only a few apps, very low powered device. But people
| loved it because the things it did well it did very well- for
| instance it was a beautiful touchscreen that always remained
| silky smooth. The feeling of sliding something and having it
| _stay under your finger_ really tricks your brain in a way
| nothing did before, and is so good you forget the weaknesses and
| missing features.
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