4 ms·

Minimum Viable Personality

10 points by dustingetz 5y ago

daniel-cussen 5y ago
Mmmm I'm not so sure. There's a type of "quirky" that's really mainstream, like everyone does that, every startup does that. How about really not having that many features, and just doing the job perfectly and having that be it? Like in the original Latin sense, per-fect, carried out all the way through. Like really reliable, like use software tools from aerospace engineering to make a todo list app. I like eating bacon, but I also like eating bread. Sometimes I want bread. Or bacon and bread in a BLT (bacon-lettuce-tomato sandwich).
- solarmist 5y ago
  > How about really not having that many features, and just doing the job perfectly and having that be it? There are a couple of problems with that I can think of. 1) A new product will never be perfect. No matter the resources put into it. It's just not possible. Reality is full of inconvenient details, and no one is good enough to get them all the first time around. 2) People need to want to try the product. And the words used to do that matter. Calling something a "task manager" vs "project manager" vs "Todo list" all have different implications even if the feature list is identical. Now add in the difficulty of getting people to see your product description, to begin with. "Personalty" is one way to deal with 1 and 2 simultaneously. As much as we want the presentation not to matter, it does.
  - daniel-cussen 5y ago
    > 1) A new product will never be perfect. No matter the resources put into it. It's just not possible. Reality is full of inconvenient details, and no one is good enough to get them all the first time around. So a new product won't but in time maybe it actually can be? Within some scope. Like is a 10 point gymnastic routine really perfect? Can you actually claim it isn't perfect because there's variables you could measure that could have been more optimal? I would say not. For humans there is human-attainable perfection, and for products there is product-attainable perfection. Through iteration, of course, but not only iteration, also by really thinking about the problem, working it out, having good taste, trying out all the possibilities in some restricted way.
    - solarmist 5y ago
      Sure, I often believe that mature products should be put into maintenance only because the features that matter have all been completed. Still, this post is about minimum viable ____ "MV_," so presumably, the product is as far from that point as possible.

10 points by dustingetz 5y ago

Mmmm I'm not so sure. There's a type of "quirky" that's really mainstream, like everyone does that, every startup does that. How about really not having that many features, and just doing the job perfectly and having that be it? Like in the original Latin sense, per-fect, carried out all the way through. Like really reliable, like use software tools from aerospace engineering to make a todo list app. I like eating bacon, but I also like eating bread. Sometimes I want bread. Or bacon and bread in a BLT (bacon-lettuce-tomato sandwich).

solarmist 5y ago
> How about really not having that many features, and just doing the job perfectly and having that be it? There are a couple of problems with that I can think of. 1) A new product will never be perfect. No matter the resources put into it. It's just not possible. Reality is full of inconvenient details, and no one is good enough to get them all the first time around. 2) People need to want to try the product. And the words used to do that matter. Calling something a "task manager" vs "project manager" vs "Todo list" all have different implications even if the feature list is identical. Now add in the difficulty of getting people to see your product description, to begin with. "Personalty" is one way to deal with 1 and 2 simultaneously. As much as we want the presentation not to matter, it does.
- daniel-cussen 5y ago
  > 1) A new product will never be perfect. No matter the resources put into it. It's just not possible. Reality is full of inconvenient details, and no one is good enough to get them all the first time around. So a new product won't but in time maybe it actually can be? Within some scope. Like is a 10 point gymnastic routine really perfect? Can you actually claim it isn't perfect because there's variables you could measure that could have been more optimal? I would say not. For humans there is human-attainable perfection, and for products there is product-attainable perfection. Through iteration, of course, but not only iteration, also by really thinking about the problem, working it out, having good taste, trying out all the possibilities in some restricted way.
  - solarmist 5y ago
    Sure, I often believe that mature products should be put into maintenance only because the features that matter have all been completed. Still, this post is about minimum viable ____ "MV_," so presumably, the product is as far from that point as possible.