Culture Clash #292 - The new MVP: Simple, Lovable & Complete
When thinking of building a new product or feature, most of us have been taught to follow the MVP approach. A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a version of a product with just enough features to be usable by early customers. Those customers then provide feedback for future product development. This approach has been the de-facto standard when designing and building products for the last decade or so. It might be time for a re-think.
I personally have never thought to question the MVP approach. It’s been proven to work and makes logical sense.
Jason Cohen, of WP Engine, an unlikely source of product wisdom, begs to differ.
This past week, I discovered a post of Jason’s from 2017 that picks apart this fascinating and very relevant topic. Jason’s post, I hate MVPs. So do your customers. Make it SLC instead, is worth taking a close look at. It’s brimming with creative product thinking. The post pushes the stagnant thinking of MVP and proposes a new product development model. Jason dubs this new approach: SLC
Simple, Lovable and Complete (SLC). At WP Engine we pronounce it “Slick.” As in: “What’s the ‘Slick’ version of your idea?”
Jason argues that the underlying motivation behind MVP is still valid. Building something small and predictable, getting to market quickly and easily deserting your idea if it doesn’t work. But many products taking the MVP approach tend to focus on the minimum instead of the viable part of MVP.
In order to get to market quickly and test your idea, the product needs to be simple. Where SLC takes a detour from MVP is by insisting on product completeness. Simple and complete are not mutually exclusive. They can coexist.
Think of the first version of Spotify, Clubhouse, or Twitter. These products each felt simple and complete when initially released to the world. Chris Carella, a friend a fellow product thinker, had some words of wisdom about these examples:
Each of them contain the value prop in their atomic unit (a tweet, a playlist, a conversation) and just by presenting that atomic unit, you have full use of the product
A thought, a song, a conversation were so perfectly captured in the initial presentation of the products they were fun, powerful and useful on first try.
The final component of SLC is Lovable. It’s harder to make a product that has limited functionality but is deeply loved. A more recent example is Roam Research, the note-taking app, and tool for thought. The initial version of the product I tried was incredibly simple. Notes, you can link together and an automatic daily note that prompts you to write. A year later, I’m still using the product. This simple, complete, and lovable solution is having a massive impact on my productivity. I’ve recommended it to dozens of people.
There is a major hidden benefit to the SLC approach, optionality. A successful SLC product provides its’ creator with options of where to go next. You don’t have to add anything to the original product as it’s complete and provides meaningful business value. You do however have the option to add more features over time and increase the value proposition. In the case of Roam Research, they’ve gone on to add many features over the past year. However, the original use case the same. About 95% of the time, I’m still using the original SLC product.
5 Links
I’m really enjoying Brian Lovin’s new side venture, Staff Design. It’s all about navigating the Individual Contributor path in design. This is an important topic for the industry and a real challenge for many talented designers. Rasmus Andersson is a designer, founding member of Spotify and has worked at Facebook, Dropbox and Figma.
A fascinating deep learning technology that enables you to animate the faces in still family photos. There is something both very cool and very creepy about this. But it’s worth trying out.
✍🏻 Four causes for ‘Zoom fatigue’ and their solutions
You probably already know all of this intuitively, but these are the scientific reasons why using Zoom for 8 hours a day is so bad for you. Here’s to more phone calls and asyncronomous communication.
📷 A Photographer, Seen Through the Eyes of His Late Wife
An incredibly touching and inspirational photo project. I was really moved by this story.
Excellent game by the master game developer Zach Gage. This is such a cool concept.
Really Bad Chess is just like chess, but with totally random pieces. Try 8 Knights, 4 Bishops, and 3 pawns — why not?
Microsoft released a pretty decent and FREE transcription app. In my testing it works really well. Excellent for transcribing meeting notes.