Progress vs. Perfection: Minimum Viable Product Thinking
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.
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...
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