MVPs don’t work anymore

When Piktochart was at its infancy, we used to say “MVP” all the time. It was the philosophy behind everything we did from thinking about the user interface to adding new features. Here’s a brief process of what we did in selecting a new feature and building it:

1. Write down all the ideas about what could work
2. Pick the one that would have the greatest impact with the least amount of work
3. Start working towards it and launch it
4. Measure its effectiveness
5. Scrap/Improve or Re-build

The time that was taken from #1 to #2 might have been 20 minutes, #3 about 1 day. We will then push the code to production and hope that everything works! Quotes like these were famous in 2011, “If it doesn’t break, you’re not moving fast enough.”

Today at Piktochart, a similar process would have taken more than 1 day and 22 minutes. A friend, Thomas Yip from Radica Software quoted that the current concept of “Minimum viable product” seems to have a large emphasis on minimum instead of viable. In 2015, you won’t see any beta product on ProductHunt that breaks. The analogy is that it will be like a book that has not been read beyond prologue and tossed in a corner to gather dust.

In the wake of throwing away “Minimum viable product”, we have picked up a new methodology which unfortunately, without my technical background makes it sound illegit.

1. Collect data from users
2. Sketch on paper (Wireframe) & research what’s out there
3. Discuss
4. Sleep on it
5. Decide
6. Build it
7. Measure

With the new process, the shortest it has taken us to get through #1 to 5 is 2 weeks. Step 4 is actually really important. After discussions, it’s usual to either have everyone completely persuaded by one charismatic leader of the discussion or to have no one agreeing on the concept. Sleeping on it is therefore a crucial and inexcusable component of the 7 steps. Comparing this new methodology with “Build, Measure, Learn” doesn’t even make sense. We still care about measuring the results but the point is that by going through this 7 step process, whatever we have built should be good enough that we’re certain it’s going to yield an incremental positive result.

We can no longer make mistakes with products. Users are not willing to tolerate a poorly-executed change. Many products in the past 5 years have won hearts of users over reliability, simplicity and focus on delivering 1 positive user experience really well. I feel extremely blessed to have been forgiven of the mistakes that we made at Piktochart when we first started out.

I have to remind myself that it is okay to take a longer time to ponder upon, deliberate and be sure that we’re out there to build the best and most excellent version of our product.

Do you agree? Or are you still in for MVPs? 🙂