A Minimum, Good Thing

Here at the hive we’ve been chattering about one of the most foundational concepts in product: the MVP, or Minimum Viable Product. As product folks know well, an MVP is a small, early version of a product that delivers value to a user, tests a product’s value thesis, and teaches a team what to do next. In some conceptions, it’s the cupcake to a multi-layered wedding cake; in others, it’s the skateboard that leads to a race car.

Over the past decade the notion of the MVP has been hammered and stretched, and now it’s not uncommon for teams to use MVP to mean “everything we can fit in before our first deadline” or “the first group of features in a list about which we are pretty certain.” Heartbreaking, I know. To counteract these misconceptions of MVP, smart folks have developed smart variations, often with other words and letters replacing some portion of the MVP acronym. We’ve seen excellent conceptions like MLP (Minimum Lovable Product, a favorite here at SDG), or the marketer’s beloved MMP (Minimum Marketable Product) and its variation the MMF (Minimum Marketable Feature). Some product people even advise delivering the MAP (Minimum Awesome Product).

These variants are good and useful. But I don’t think of them as alternatives to the MVP; I think of them as types of MVP. The heart of the MVP remains what it always has been: it reinforces that to reach the big, excellent thing, we should start with a small, excellent thing. And to reach the small thing, we might start with the smaller, still excellent thing. So MLP, MMP, or MAP aren’t in opposition to the MVP; they’re expressions of it. The point has always been to start with an achievable iteration of something that is viable, feasible, lovable, marketable, sellable, awesome. Which adjective we emphasize depends on the risk we need to understand or the hypothesis we need to validate.

The 20th Century American writer Raymond Carver wrote a tremendous short story called A Small, Good Thing. In it, a couple gets into a dispute with a baker about a birthday cake for their son, who has been the victim of a tragic accident. The story concludes in a moment of reconciliation when the baker and the couple share fresh bread, which the baker describes as a “small, good thing.”

Astute Pollinator readers will notice that those three words comprising the title of that Carver story and the three words comprising the Minimum Viable (or Lovable or Marketable or Awesome) Product are nearly synonyms. Small = Minimum. Good = Viable. Thing = Product. If you struggle to define your Minimum What-able Product, perhaps replace its elaborate multi-syllabic Latinate words with Carver’s simpler, older, Germanic ones. Start by giving your customers a small, good thing.

On to the Garden.

Around the Garden

A Cure for AI-induced Product Career Anxiety

Check it out: 15 Product Management Skills Beyond the Reach of AI , Product Leadership and 10 Product Management Skills That AI Will Never Automate , Adrianna Berring, Product School.

My son is a college student in a product- and design-related university program. He mentioned that he and some classmates recently had an interesting discussion with a professor about the threat that Artificial Intelligence (AI) posed to their career prospects. I hear this anxiety from product and design pros quite often. Will AI come for our careers? Are we replaceable? If ChatGPT could generate product specs, persona descriptions, value propositions, then what use is a product manager?

These two recent articles from Product Leadership and Adrianna Berring of Product School are a balm for the AI-anxious product manager. They both outline essential skills that AI will struggle to effectively replicate, including empathy, adaptability, and sense-making. I especially like Adrianna Berring’s framing of these AI-proof skills as the ability to “act with incomplete inputs.”

Decisions Deflect Data-Driven Dangers

Check it out: The 'data-driven' mindset feeds our dangerous craving for certainty , Kyle Byrd, The Uncertainty Project.

This post by Kyle Byrd of the wise team at The Uncertainty Project does something I love: it inspects a commonly held truism and forces us to rethink what we once assumed. In this case, the writers examine people’s tendency to venerate being led by “the data.” We product folks are guilty of this. We proudly exclaim “we’re data-driven” in order to feel like we know something — and oh, what a reassuring sensation that is. But we may be deceived by data’s wiles — which, as this piece enumerates, include things like confirmation bias, ambiguity aversion, and a desire for “cognitive closure.”

The antidote to data-driven’s dangers is to be decision-driven. Be guided by the choices you must make, rather than the data that confirms your biases or gives you a misguided but comforting sense of certainty. As the article reminds us:

Love (Sierpinski) Triangle

Check it out: User Experience Design Process: A Fractal Model (video) and (article), Therese Mushock, UX Planet. 

If I were a lion king, and I had a cub, I would look out at the night sky over the Serengeti and let that little cub know that there are as many models and frameworks for product and user experience as there are stars in the vast galaxy. One of my favorites of these innumerable models and frameworks: this fractal model from a UX practitioner named Therese Mushock. It’s based on the geometry of a Sierpinski Triangle. I came across it a few years ago, and I revisit it occasionally. The video explains the idea in depth; the article offers some additional context.

What I like is that it’s not a linear, left-to-right, do-this-before-that process. In fact it exists outside that entire paradigm of process models. Once you work in product or UX a while, you notice this recursive, fractal nature of our concerns. Mushock’s model is built on this clever observation. We may work big; we may work small. We research, inspect, and reframe daily, as we do by the release, as we do over our careers. The mystical stuff in Mushock’s write-up (like pyrimidia and the triforce) is a bit squishy for my tastes, but the practical applications of her model are really helpful. I could spend hours contemplating it. I suspect you could too.

Totally Tubular Product Development

Check it out: The New New Product Development Game, by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka, Harvard Business Review, January 1986. 

This Harvard Business Review article is from way back in 1986, when some of you readers may have not yet been born, and folks of my Gen-X vintage were grooving on Molly Ringwald films and lamenting David Lee Roth’s split with Van Halen. It’s instructive to realize that modern, empowered agile product development practices were trumpeted nearly 40 years ago, before the Web or mobile apps even existed. The writers even use the metaphor of rugby and scrums that is ubiquitous in agile tech teams these days.

I mean look at some of these passages about “new new product development” in the mid-1980s at places like Fuji-Xerox or Honda. Don’t you think they could have come from the most cutting-edge contemporary digital product coach?

• “Under the old approach…The project went sequentially from phase to phase…Under the rugby approach, the product development process emerges from the constant interaction of a hand-picked, multidisciplinary team whose members work together from start to finish.”

• “On a day-to-day basis, top management seldom intervenes; the team is free to set its own direction.”

• “Under the holistic or rugby approach, the phases overlap considerably, which enables the group to absorb the vibration or “noise” generated throughout the development process.”

• “Team members engage in a continual process of trial and error to narrow down the number of alternatives that they must consider.”

• “Encourage engineers to go out into the field and listen to what customers and dealers have to say.”

In the words of the Talking Heads: Same as it ever was. That’s also from the ‘80s, by the way.

Outside the Box

There are a few universal human experiences: discovery, loss, love, regret, trying to figure out what movie to watch on your streaming services. A Good Movie to Watch won’t do much about those first few, but it’s exceptional at dealing with that last matter. Essentially, you can specify factors like genre, mood, popularity, era, and rating, and AGM2W will suggest movies or shows to fill your Friday night. It’s concerned with quality, too — their staff evaluates and rates every selection. Feeling frisky? Try the “random” feature. https://agoodmovietowatch.com

About The Pollinator

• The Pollinator is a free publication from the Product practice at Solution Design Group (SDG). Each issue is a curated digest of noteworthy content and articles from across the internet’s vast product community.

• Solution Design Group (SDG) is an employee-owned business and technology consulting company. From ideation to implementation, we help transform organizations through well-made and well-loved digital products. Utilizing our customer-centric approach, and our wide array of capabilities, we deliver innovative solutions that drive business growth and success for our customers.

• The Pollinator's editor is Jason Scherschligt, SDG's Head of Product. Please direct complaints, suggestions, and especially praise to Jason at [email protected].

• Why The Pollinator? Jason often says that as he works with leaders and teams across companies and industries, he feels like a honeybee in a garden, spending time on one flower, moving to another, collecting experiences and insights, and distributing them like pollen, so an entire garden blooms. How lovely.