Shitty MVPs
Of course, you have grand visions for your Product. You can see all of the slick transitions, snappy response and beautiful design in your mind’s eye. You know where you want it to go, so why not start by building it that way? Why not make your Minimum Viable Product so that it takes advantage of all of the visual flourishes and Javascript powered dynamic elements that you know it will use?
Because you’ll get stuck in it. It will become your tar pit. You’ll drown in the details of trying to make things ‘pop’, in trying to work around the bugs inherent in cutting edge client side frameworks because the technology is still so young, and you’ll never make it.The pressure from all of the amazing Startups you see makes you think that this is the minimum bar. It isn’t.
You’ll become depressed because you never seem to make any progress on closing the loop on delivering real value that customers actually want and need. You’ll have a bunch of pretty screens that look nice and maybe even cause the odd gasp, but your product will be as empty of value as the ruins of some Victorian gentleman’s folly.
The writer Anne Lamott wrote a book called Bird by Bird in 1995, and in it she writes about ‘Shitty First Drafts’. She talks about how unless you let yourself write that Shitty First Draft, you’ll be trapped by endless revision and all of the latent voices in your head that prevent you from finishing will rear up and sabotage you. You should buy her book.
Let your MVP be your shitty first draft. Get it done in the shittiest way possible, but make sure the value is there. This isn’t to say that Design isn’t a powerful way to communicate value, but in terms of birthing your MVP onto the world, it shouldn’t be your primary concern. Dieter Rams didn’t apply his design skills to useless objects.
If the value is there, there will be plenty of time for all that whizz bang stuff later, and in the meantime you will feel you achieved something of merit.
