[davismwfl]

Don't assume the management hasn't done their homework, fair to ask questions but be careful not to sound accusatory saying why not do X instead of Y.

Not knowing if you work at a startup or a larger company it is hard to judge part of this. But if you are at a startup with a mature product there are valid reasons to not do an MVP feature release. The Lean Startup philosophy isn't right for everything, but it is a good start for new businesses/products overall, just not all. For a mature product or a product in a regulated industry (finance, healthcare, aerospace etc) the rules change and the maturity of each new feature has to be different. For example, in healthcare, you can't go to the FDA with a product and expect to keep iterating on features quickly, the product must be complete before submittal, and each new feature must be reviewed to see if a whole new submission is required or if an abbreviated submission can be used. Either way it is another cycle which takes months at best.

At this point, the management may have done enough research or market testing to justify the development time. Or alternatively they are taking a calculated bet and are pushing the product a specific direction intentionally. The larger the organization the less likely they are going to do an MVP because releasing small features and incrementing on it can be harder to sell to clients when you have a mature product and the clients have specific expectations.

Also, sometimes you have to build out a set of functionality that takes longer before a client can see it. Doesn't mean you won't necessarily have lots of smaller incremental milestones internally, but for feature release it might take 9 months. The more you make it into regulated work too, like aerospace, financial, healthcare etc the more likely this is to happen. Even during the development time, they may be presenting early demonstrations to clients just not releasing the feature for usage.