Not a big fan of the article, but don’t dismiss the concept. I’m not sure if my former employer coined “MLP” or not, but we certainly used it extensively; I gen

Not a big fan of the article, but don’t dismiss the concept. I’m not sure if my former employer coined “MLP” or not, but we certainly used it extensively; I generally would describe it to clients as a “vertical slice” of the vision that is just wide enough to solve a single meaningful problem and deep enough to be viable as a standalone product. The MLP approach gave design a tight focus on the product and service experience that ensured they couldn’t blue-sky the design, let development get a full product out the door in a reasonable rapid schedule and with decent QA bounds, and ensured the business had something that that could be market-tested and form the basis of further growth. You have to think about the long-term “thriveability” of the MLP and how it fits into the business model, so it’s not a free lunch, but I’ve found it to be an effective way to avoid the usual pitfalls of boiling the ocean, early abstraction, unmaintainable scope creep, and so on.