Progress vs. Perfection: Minimum Viable Product Thinking

“The way to solve prob­lems is to uncov­er them as you go and then piv­ot to meet them.” — Eric Reis, The Start­up Way

Whether your orga­ni­za­tion is new or has been around for a cou­ple gen­er­a­tions, chances are you waste time dri­ving for perfection.

It doesn’t mat­ter if you’re talk­ing about a phys­i­cal prod­uct, a dig­i­tal prod­uct or a pre­sen­ta­tion deck, peo­ple often try to make it per­fect with­out ask­ing for feed­back while it’s still a work in progress. When you shoot for per­fec­tion first – to be a Most Valu­able Play­er – you miss the oppor­tu­ni­ty to build it bet­ter in the first place — and to deter­mine if there’s an audi­ence who wants it.

It’s what I call the dri­ve for pre­sen­ta­tion over performance.

Min­i­mum Viable Product

It’s far bet­ter to shoot for a dif­fer­ent kind of MVP: A Min­i­mum Viable Prod­uct – to cre­ate a pro­to­type of what­ev­er you are mak­ing, specif­i­cal­ly as a way to present your ideas. Way bet­ter than spend­ing incred­i­ble amounts of time and mon­ey on some­thing that may or may not see the light of day.

In The Start­up Way, author Eric Ries describes a Build-Mea­sure-Learn feed­back loop – an incre­men­tal, iter­a­tive way of quick­ly and cost-effec­tive­ly deter­min­ing if an idea is viable.

This doesn’t have to be a com­pli­cat­ed process. Here are a cou­ple of quick examples:

• A client we work with want­ed to build a new phone App. Instead of invest­ing in build­ing from scratch, we decid­ed to gath­er and cor­re­late the data from three exist­ing apps to give us a new piece of infor­ma­tion, and to test hypothe­ses. We quick­ly knew exact­ly what we need­ed to build and saved $200,000 in R&D in the process.
• My team recent­ly need­ed quick turn­around on a new piece of col­lat­er­al. Instead of spend­ing hours cre­at­ing what we thought could be a fin­ished prod­uct, we quick­ly cre­at­ed an MVP using Pow­er­Point and a flow chart then ran it by the team leader. He pro­vid­ed feed­back and only then did we invest time in design.

Your MVP can be as sim­ple as a sketch on a nap­kin, and mea­sur­ing (test­ing) can be as sim­ple as ask­ing ques­tions — lots of them:

• “Is this what you had in mind?”
• “What do you mean by that?”
• “What works and what doesn’t?”
• “You want blue – what shade are you think­ing of.”

In fact, ask­ing the same ques­tion three dif­fer­ent ways can help you to go deep, and then sit back while you hold the space for peo­ple to think and to speak. You’ll be amazed at the clar­i­ty you can uncover.

Of course, this may require a shift in how your orga­ni­za­tion cur­rent­ly works. As Reis sees it, inno­va­tion is no dif­fer­ent from oth­er tra­di­tion­al man­age­ment prac­tices. They are all root­ed in a foun­da­tion of account­abil­i­ty, on which is added process, cul­ture, and people.

Think of it as build­ing a new mus­cle or skill set – it won’t be per­fect the first time but then again, isn’t that the idea?

The Chal­lenge

• What new prod­uct, ser­vice or impor­tant project are you work­ing on now that could ben­e­fit from MVP thinking?
• What are the check­points that allow to you to iter­ate and recal­i­brate along the way – and then what is the MVP for each stage?
• What sup­port do you need to try it?

Tim Schokking is a Coach and Strate­gic Plan­ning Advi­sor at Lawrence & Co. Growth Advisors.