Slow Down, Be Careful

A call for the end of the MVP

I recently saw an advert on Sky about some upcoming documentary about Zuckerberg, and hearing “move fast and break things” shook me back to the mid-10s when it seemed every CTO was saying it on an hourly cycle. Facebook’s now-revoked but still-famous motto fed into the pervasive Minimum Viable Product mindset that seeped into just about every crack in the tech world over the past decade and a half. But it sucks. And it has probably always sucked.

In 2024, increasingly few of us are naive enough to believe that the tech gurus who promised us a faster/brighter/more connected future are actually going to deliver it, or even get us close and a decent chunk of us aren’t even sure they’ve made anything better.

MVP-thinking is one of the most obvious symptoms of this malaise. The idea that you should build as little as possible, release it to market as quickly as possible, see what happens and iterate is a widely adopted status quo in the tech world. I’m sure most of you have worked this way at least once, or, more likely, have only worked this way. At best, it’s created a world of half-baked, broken and abandoned products and at worst it’s lead to products that have world changing societal impacts that very few ever took the time to see coming.

Defined in the early 2000s, it exploded during the startup boom of the low-interest-rate 2010s. Desperate not to miss out on huge returns at the IPO, venture capital and cheap loans were ploughed into companies across all sectors with CTOs promising that, like Facebook, they’d “move fast and break things”, spending as little as possible to make gargantuan sums of money, even when money was historically easy to come by. Mistakes caused by this way of thinking didn’t matter much when money was cheap. Why worry?

It quickly spread from lean tech startups into businesses and organisations of all scales, even those that had no need to “move at pace”. It wasn’t even limited to new products any more, but practically all work was infected with the idea of doing the least with the knowing lie that we’d go back and iterate on it later.

You could contest that working the way so many of us do is a bastardisation of the methodology. You’re not meant to release it to every one, it’s only meant to go to early adopters. Yet that approach comes with its own problems. “Early adopters” are a poor group to validate your product or feature, when, by definition, those that are interested and excitable about new things because of their newness are more likely to give you a positive response. This is especially dangerous when it comes to entirely new features, because they can be so exciting. Asking the people who are most excited for something novel whether X is a good idea and should be released is peak naivete. After all, rats don’t eat the poison because they think it’s poison, they eat it because they’re excited for food.

Charlie Ebdy’s recent piece, The Trouble With Trends, succinctly challenged the idea that being the first-mover in a market even holds value, and that, in many cases, those organisations that bided their time and waited for mistakes to be made have become the true market leaders. If being the first out of the blocks doesn’t even matter that much, or even hinders you, why are we trying to move so quickly anyway? We never understand the full potential of a technology immediately. Real wants, needs and use cases emerge slowly as the world comes to terms with the change.

Short term thinking, propagated by models like MVP, has been hugely damaging. Failure to understand what our products might become, who might use it, how it might begin to shape society around it and how it might be misused or taken advantage of has meant that time and time again, products marketed as a tool of liberation have become anything but. Airbnb’s democratisation of travel has seen residents driven from homes due to extortionate rent increases, 24/7 access to shopping, gaming and gambling has driven addictions to new heights, Facebook executives have been hauled in front of congress to answer for Russian interference in a presidential election…

It also stunts creativity. The more that designers are encouraged to think about delivering only the very minimum, in the very short term, the more likely they are to stop thinking about the future at all. We compromise and opt to plug in off-the-shelf features (themselves likely MVPs) because they’re fast rather than work on something we know is better.

It destroys fulfilment. The more that product teams feel like they’re never going to see this feature ever again (because after all, the MVPs never stop coming), the less invested they’ll feel. When the importance of “making mistakes” is minimised all the way into positivity, we become blind to consequences altogether.

People are growing increasingly tired of abuses of power, “isolated” mistakes and corporate recklessness. The generations which will soon become dominant in our markets and workplaces are increasingly conscious of the impact that our work can have across the globe and are looking to measure success differently than we did in the past. Concepts like degrowth are becoming more and more mainstream by the day. A balls-to-the-wall race to a completely undefined finish line is being seen as less and less sustainable. Let’s put the MVP to bed.

1. Define what success means

And I’m not talking about getting 35% of existing customers onto your new platform within 3 months. Let’s talk more openly about what we hope this feature delivers for everyone over the next 10, 20, 30 years. How do want our creation to change the world for the better? No matter how small or insignificant you might think this feature is, you’re releasing it to change something. If you don’t even know what you’re hoping to change, how can you expect to know when things need to change course?

2. Evangelise for research

MVP thinking naturally shifts the research to the end of the cycle. Reject this. We should fight for more time and resource to plan the ideal path for our features. We should study the wants and needs, we should understand the sector and context we’re releasing a product in. We should know who our intended users are, and who our unintended users might be. Our research should go beyond trying to validate whether this new feature can make money, and understand the world we’re putting it into.

3. Practice foresight

Once we know that world that we’re putting into, we should start thinking about the future of our product and feature. The positives and the negatives. The utopian and dystopian. What trends and challenges might impact the success of our product or change its purpose altogether? Do the work of the “second mover” by seeing the potential futures of your change and put yourself in a better position for success.

4. Have a long term roadmap

And I mean long term. Not 6 months. Not 18 months. Break this cycle. Understand how we’re going to maintain this feature for the next 5 years. 10 years. 50 years. Know how you’re going to hold yourself and the product accountable to the vision you set out in step one. Know what you might need to sacrifice to stay aligned to that vision.

5. Optimise what you already have

The biggest opportunity might be right in front of you. Are your current offerings already working as hard as they can? The world doesn’t move on as fast as the tech-fetishists insist it does. Tens of millions of newspapers are still sold daily in the UK. Three hundred years deep into capitalism hasn’t managed to rid the world of monarchy yet. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to progress by improving something you’ve already got.