Making sense of Minimum Viable Product

An article about workflow optimization and making the customer happy:

Many projects fail badly because they do Big Bang delivery, or building until the project is 100% done before delivering at the end. A lot of time has passed without any actual user testing, so the product is most likely riddled with design flaws based on incorrect assumptions about what people need.

The author presents a different approach:

We focus on the underlying need the customer wants fulfilled. In response to the underlying need, the team delivers the smallest thing they can think of that will get the customer testing things and giving us feedback.

We're not trying to make the customer happy at this point. We might make a few early adopters happy (or pragmatists in pain), but our main goal at this point is just to learn

No matter how much up-front analysis you do, you’re still surprised when you put the first real release into the hands of a real user, and many of your assumptions turn out to be way off.

So, do some up-front analysis, discover as much as you can before starting development. But don't spend too much time on it and don't trust the analysis too much - start prototyping and releasing instead.

And shares some real life examples based on Spotify, Minecraft, a Goverment project and LEGO.

You can read the whole article at everup.com