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> Beware of market expertise ego and dogfooding as it only reinforce your expertise and biases. Bring industry newcomers to your project for feedback, it’s the only way to make sure your expertise doesn’t make your product only valuable for yourself. Good point, but this particular demographic has no problem letting me know where the rough bits are. The thing about the MVP pattern, is that software people seem to think that we get to go by different rules, from everyone else. Software lets us iterate quickly, and I have found ways to leverage that (I call it "Evolutionary Design"[0]), but that does not give me license to deliberately foist garbage onto end users; especially ones that are quick to anger, and slow to forgive. Every other craft, engineering discipline, and production system, throughout history, has had to take the risk of going through a design phase, based on expertise, user surveys, need evaluations, etc., then actually get to at least production prototype phase, before determining whether or not to proceed further. It's a risk, but one that everyone has been taking, for hundreds of years. For some reason, we software people seem to think that the flexibility of software absolves us of the Responsibility to deliver a high-quality prototype, and that we don't need to take the same risks that everyone else has been taking throughout history. I totally agree that said flexibility gives us a great opportunity to actually deliver a much more suitable product, than was achievable, with other production methodologies, and ease of iteration is how we get there. I just don't agree that we start by throwing out some junk, without first doing some real homework. I'm really tired of seeing junk prototypes becoming the shipped product. Once it is out there, and running in production, it's quite difficult to make the kinds of pivots and changes that are almost certainly required, without turning the app into a disgusting mess. One of the nice things about the last couple of years, is that I have been able to completely nuke the database, several times, as we have pivoted. I'd never be able to do that, if it were a production app. I'd have to devise some kind of horrible kludge, or, more likely, limit the pivot. [0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/evolutionary-design-... |