Please don’t feel offended by subject line, I fully respect and admire The Taj Mahal, The Taj Mahal is one of the jewels of Indian History & 7th wonder of the world. I just want to resemble the process of building the product.
Generally people has vision to build something great like The Taj Mahal but building the great product (Like Taj Mahal) takes a lot from us in term of time, energy, effort & money and sometimes it test our skill set like patience, attitude, courage & passion while traveling on bumpy road.
I have different take on it, although I love Taj Mahal, I visited number of times and each visit give me deep attraction and emotional attachment but Product building is not like building Taj Mahal. Product building is like building the home to live and then recalling and sharing all emotions/events with friends and family like joy, hassle & problems during the creations of home. Sometime we accept and laugh on our stupid mistakes and make few changes/pivot to save damage…..Yes Building home and product are similar :-).
Generally I recommend to use below practice….
- Create Minimum Viable Product (MVP) roadmap
- Start working on MVP
- Release the MVP with known bugs (Yes this is true because Nirvana can never be achieve)
- Start for next release adding more features and fixing old release bugs
- After few releases, Start adding customers feedback as improvements or new feature requests
- Repeat previous step ….
Slowly slowly… Your Rome will build and you will enjoy during building and staying in it.
So, What is MVP (Minimum Viable Product)?
Different people have different takes on it as per their own experience but for me if I am hungry then my MVP would be bread and butter. Yes, that’s it, I am starving and I need something ASAP to eat :-).
MVP should be bare minimum which is required to run the business and then start building on it like toppings over the pizza base after customer input 🙂
We always talk about KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) but do we really implement it in product life cycle? We as product owner always offer too many features in bundled packages like combo meals to customers which always confuse customers like me 🙂
I always believe “Rome wasn’t built in a day and wasn’t build by a single man”. Only the good team can build a great product & should always be customer-centric to listen to customer voice.