While I appreciate that the author put in the time and effort to write this, I have to say that I disagree with pretty much all of this.
Beyond quibbling about specific points, the MVP and the Vertical Slice are functionally similar they totally different in their purpose. Video Games are generally competing for a slice of a large preexisting market. The test is whether it can compete against existing products. A new to the world software start up is trying to serve a need that is currently unserved. The test is whether there is any market at all for this product (PMF). The 80/20 rule is about getting some validation that the thing you are building is worth building in the first place - not that it can be done, but that it should be done.
There aren't a ton of specific examples listed, but the images might insinuate some products that the author has in mind. I would just point out that Magic Leap, Humane were both hardware products that spent >5 years in development. They cam out as completed fully finished products that were complete by any standard. The problem wasn't that these products shipped with missing features, it was that nobody wanted what they were selling (see also the Apple Vision Pro, which is technically phenomenal in terms of design/engineering/manufacturing, but not really very useful). These products did the opposite of the Lean Methodology and show the risk of trying something brand new and not validating the assumptions as quickly as possible.
>> A new to the world software start up is trying to serve a need that is currently unserved.
Well, yes in some cases. In lots of others it's just another implementation of existing software. Oh, you're building another food delivery app, because the current one is missing feature xxx?
This doesn't make them bad, the world is full of different contexts, and providing a solution tailored to a specific context is valuable.
But most startups are not "novel". Even in a novel space (like self driving cars) there are a bunch of companies in that space (basically competing for VC money. )
I'm very much in the MVP camp - if anything I'm more extreme- I'm in the "show me a market and how to reach them before coding anything" camp.
There are other parts than the product that can the innovation for a startup. Very few things are novel product wise when they hit it big. Innovation can be bringing existing business model to a new market for example. Then you should most likely 80/20 that new thing.
To quibble a bit, I don’t think that magic leap one released as complete products.
Magic leap had like a 30 degree FOV and no software. It was a dev kit, literally. The consumer version was never released IIRC
Also, I don’t think you argued against the main thesis which is something like “startup land is too good at the first 80% of a product, but not the latter 20%”
That rings true for me. Our industry is not known for robustness and quality. There is robust and high quality software out there, but most of it is not.
Magic leap is an atypical example. It wasn't a "lean startup", it spent billions of dollars and many years developing an El Dorado [1] [2] [3] technology. They would have liked to deliver the system they had promised but investors were right to pressure them to deliver something -- even a broadly available dev kit is an important milestone for a technology like that.
> Video Games are generally competing for a slice of a large preexisting market. The test is whether it can compete against existing products. A new to the world software start up is trying to serve a need that is currently unserved.
I feel like it's completely the opposite. A new game doesn't need to "replace" old games. People have played those games. It only needs to be new and good enough to get people's attention.
But tools usually are replacing something existing. Tech that actually creates new possibilities is few and far between. The internet is one example of that. Can you think of another? I think most new tech is aiming to replace older tech that is currently used for those problems.
I don't really disagree but if you look at the most played games on steam many of them are now old. There's a growing inventory of games that are turning into classics.
>A new to the world software start up is trying to serve a need that is currently unserved.
man, really? 99% of software is basically glorified CRUD view for some DB. it's nothing novel.
If we venture outside of corporate software: most startups do not create anything novel - they just monetize existing businesses in a different(usually more predatory) way, or do X but digital. both usually go for 'virtual monopoly' by: offering service(never a product!) for free -> capture the market -> enshittify -> new startups repeats the cycle.
The actual novelty where you find a need that is unserved is sub 0.1% of them.
In reality you aim for product that fits current buzzword meta for funding.
I do 100% agree that product-market-fit is probably the thing you should try to get ASAP though.
That's the point. It's not supposed to be technologically novel, at least at start. It's a new business. The innovation is in the business part.
When we were in Rome and exited the Colosseum, it started raining. Some random dude walked to us and sold us an umbrella. Great business, both of us were better off.
Which is precisely why the point of an MVP is not to demonstrate that something can be built but that someone would pay for it once it is built. Of course it can be built, it's technologically simple. It's not minimum viable tech demo, it's minimum viable product.
Though I appreciate the effort you put into your response, I think you're quibbling and missed the point.
His qualm is with companies developing what amounts to a good demo (whether you call it MVP, prototype, Beta product, etc), validate their hypothesis but then call it a finished product.
Validation is supposed to be just that, validation. Instead he's arguing companies call that initial validation market success, then relabel the demo a working product, warts and all.
And, you're correct in saying the Vision Pro didn't flop because it wasn't developed properly. It flopped because no one wants what it has to offer, and that's a different problem from what the author describes
I'm still not convinced on this though. These MVPs are usually a lot less minimal than you would expect for a prototype - far more than just wireframes and a basic POC that you expect to chuck out and rewrite. Might even have a handful of paying users as well.
Since the comparison was made to games development, I think the closer equivalent is an early access release where you're generally paying for a WIP game at a lower price. Money changes hands, you get access to product in return, but there's no guarantee that it would ever be 'finished' or even what 'finished' might mean.
I think it’s also worth mentioning that the author fundamentally misunderstands a MVP. A vertical slice video game presentation _is_ a kind of MVP, and there are tons of anecdotes e.g. from the E3 that tell us just how minimal these can be.
MVPs take different shapes and forms, a polished but limited video game level is no different than a polished landing page with functionality limited to e.g. sign up.
The most equivalent milestone to MVP in games is first playable (FP) or prototype. This is done at first pass/L1/greybox quality.
Vertical slice (VS) is a type of beautiful corner — this is done at production quality.
The purpose of FP is to prove the game loop and that a game is worth producing — that it is viable, or you could say that it has reached the minimum viable state. The purpose of VS is to try out the entire production process and test burndowns, etc.
I can confirm, as someone who has worked in games for decades, that the author understands it correctly.
FP in automotive would be a prototype car, VS in automotive would be the first factory produced car. VS in games often marks the end of pre-production and a shift of priorities from iterating and experimenting to producing bulk content. MVP would be much earlier.
Then in another sense, MVP is already marketable and commercially viable. But a game is that neither at VS nor FP. So if you look at MVP from that perspective, it is not even close to either VS or FP. It would be like somewhere beyond around alpha. In any case, MVP != VS :)
The MVP concept doesn’t work with game production that well because it’s a hit driven industry where most of the costs go into producing the hit. Like in movies, music, TV and book publishing — there are many stages of green-lighting before a product is first made available to the market as going from zero to market is where the bulk of the costs are. Going zero to market MVP as the first green-light check would be quite expensive ($50M for market leading VR/handheld, $100M for market leading console and Windows games minimum spent by the time a game is shown to the players) and risky. So instead, we start green-lighting and reviewing the prototype when <$2M is spent in most cases.
To deliver a vertical slice you also create hacks left and right and they quite often then later stand in the way of actually delivering a proper product. I remember the blog post by Ron Gilbert where he presented Da Vinci's Vertical Slice [1] and it still sits with me as one of the best way to present the issues.
A vertical slice is not an MVP because people would never consider it minimally viable. It's a tiny product but it's completely polished and it's for a consumer of one: the publisher.
I'd argue that an MVP is a minimal game with limited features - say, a platform game where you can walk and jump and finish the game, whereas a vertical slice is the complete experience, walk, jump, collect items, fight, achievements, etc, but the story is just a concept and there's only one level.
In other software, MVP is what you can go live with to all of your customers (often replacing something existing and omitting half the existing features to much chagrin).
In terms of economics and utility, the last 80% of effort produces 20% of the result. But the last 80% give us something much more that isn’t quantified: The feeling of having completed something of value, and having done it properly, carries an inherent value that surpasses the last 20% output. It is unquantifiable and priceless. This is when work or products become timeless and truly valuable. Not to mention that feeling of satisfaction and completeness of taking an accomplishment to that level.
I'd actually flip it around - in a crowded market the last 80% of work on those 20% features is what makes you stand out.
It's the detail, the little touches, that result in the comparative advantage in the market - not the shared 80% ( most chairs have 4 legs, seat and back - that 80% isn't what you compete on ).
Exactly, the extra effort to complete it is worth it, but it is costly. I think this can be explored in a positive way by selling incomplete things cheaper to the end user while using this money to sustain the development of the last 20%. I think Minecraft is a well known example of applying this model that was fair for both the developers and end users.
While I don't believe Minecraft was the first, it did set the stage for the early access model of development, which fits in great with agile development practices and sustainable practices as the developers can release their vertical slice or MVP, then continue development and correct it based on customer feedback. One example of that is Factorio that has been in development for over a decade now, providing value (enjoyable gameplay) the whole time while also getting continuous development and new features as well as a huge and lively modding community, which in itself translated into their major DLC (based on one of the bigger and more popular mods, they hired the developer and probably a few more people from the modding community).
They're "finished" with it now though, after years of weekly updates they've gone quiet in November. But, they're also working on a new game.
this satisfaction sells. there are companies built on the premise that after the last 1% of effort the sales skyrocket. the marketing narrative of having a complete, high quality product helps to stand out.
> the last 80% give us something much more that isn’t quantified: The feeling of having completed something of value, and having done it properly, carries an inherent value that surpasses the last 20% output. It is unquantifiable and priceless. This is when work or products become timeless and truly valuable. Not to mention that feeling of satisfaction and completeness of taking an accomplishment to that level.
This is why software development _as a job_ sucks, and sucks deeply: how often do you get to put the icing on the cake, and put a ribbon on it, and get a final effort that matches what you were able to envision ?
"Job" satisfaction is for _hobbyist_ software development. Capitalism generates crap software.
I've always looked at this a bit differently. For me the last 20% is fulfilling, but it's also a grind.
In a software job I rarely have to do that to get paid, I can spend most of my days on the easy stuff that gets far enough. The pay is good enough that I can spend my time outside of work doing what I want and put in the effort to grind through the last 20% and really feel proud if the end result.
This may be why so many software developers gravitate to wood working. If you have the time to put in the effort for that last 20% its very noticeable and satisfying.
For yourself, sure. But likely not for your users. In fact, I would bet Pareto is not extreme enough in this scenario.
E.g. Excel or git, or their potential eventual successors. Former and latter has largely being the same commands and feature set used by 99% of users since V1. They are now old, storied projects with enhancements and features/improvements that go decades long, and even inspired or spun out new products/projects out of the ideas built within.
For the article itself, Pareto exists as a reminder that work expended is rarely if ever equal to results produced. There are instances where it pays off. But you always pay a price. Make sure you're willing to pay that price.
Sometimes a chair with 3 legs is all you need or care for. That 4th leg might give you more balance in an uneven plane, but I work in a decently flat garage and I'm not paying the premium for that 4th leg.
Medical device control software is not build like that, drone flight control is not build like that, power plant safety is not build like that.
The problem that I noticed in the recent years is: People see the fast dev cycles for non critical software and think they can replicate it in areas where it really does not fit.
I guess that’s how we ended up with Teslas self driving.
I am a bit worried that ai seems to be build like that, using development cycles fit for a convenience appliance for what could be used as a weapon.
I always wonder where the devs come from who end up doing important work.
Seniority doesn't mean anything if a dev's 20 years has been spent flinging crap over the wall and then wondering how to keep up with all the support tickets being filed.
How does one get onto the "software is suppose to work" career track.
> How does one get onto the "software is suppose to work" career track.
Boring companies that have had IT for a long time; industries like government, taxes, energy, administration, CRM, insurance, pensions, banking, etc. You won't get recruiters knocking on your doorstep to come and work for those though, and you'll possibly be working with 10+ year old tech and development practices.
Depends on the drones. 249g Camera drone ? Probably.
45k€ agricultural spraying drone? At least the ones I had the privilege to look at were programmed quite paranoid. Farmers tend to get really pissed if their equipment dies because of software issues.
I feel like every concept can be taken too far or is expected to perfectly encapsulate every situation.
The few principles I live by are vague to avoid that predicament-
1. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good
2. Under promise, over deliver
3. Graveyards are full of indispensable men
1 took me a long time to really learn
2 In my case, where I've sucked at estimations, it's really not over deliver, but deliver my under promise.
3 is a De Gaulle quote and my favorite - when I think I can't be replaced because I've had an ego boost from a recent accomplishment. Alternatively, it can also be interpreted as 'the world goes on'.
There’s a conflation going on here. Pareto can be good engineering—a product that solves 80% of use cases at 20% of the cost is a great efficiency: tax prep software for simple tax returns only; a minimalist photo sharing site with few social features; a phone with a great UI and no user-installable apps.
This gets conflated with products that are 80% reliable across all their tasks (LLMs, brittle software). That makes it difficult for users to rely on the product, because occasionally a failure will happen, and the user can’t build a mental model of what works and doesn’t.
That's not pareto. That's just finding a niche of people who would prefer more focused products.
Tax prep software for simple returns only is an entire product. Adding support for the other 20% would lose your initial base's interest.
Tax software that aims to solve all problems whose MVP is it handles 80% of people's tax returns is the pareto the author is talking about. But the real complexity is the other 20%.
Pareto as a minimalism process for focused product development is not engineering (good or bad).
Forgetting pareto and believing (or lying) that you are truly 80% of the way there is a big problem in engineering and funding. The author is correct in that.
What if we come to a point where even the investors don't care if you can finish a product at all? If the pitch is good enough and they think you can bring in more investors down the road, they will get back their money at a higher evaluation anyway. This would actually explain why so many startups fail – nobody cared for them to succeed anyway, because the initial investors got rich even without there being a product.
My thought on the article is - by and large most people don't care if the product that have is perfect, they (myself included) only really care that it does whatever job it's supposed to do to a level that's passable.
I was, and still am, prepared to use a large number of things that aren't perfect - housing, transport, furniture, computers, clothing, FOOD, and more.
edit: Added Food, I don't get the best chef on the planet to prepare my meals every day, or any chef for the most part, not only because I don't have the money, but also because I don't value that sort of thing enough - I'm more than happy with my own cooking for the most part.
I once had a PM who loved the Pareto principle a little too much, and would constantly push us to "apply it" even after we already had. I got frustrated by this and drew the graph that goes along with your sentence, showing that miraculously about 99% of the work can be done with 60% of the effort!
My PM did not take the correct lesson away from the encounter.
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Beyond quibbling about specific points, the MVP and the Vertical Slice are functionally similar they totally different in their purpose. Video Games are generally competing for a slice of a large preexisting market. The test is whether it can compete against existing products. A new to the world software start up is trying to serve a need that is currently unserved. The test is whether there is any market at all for this product (PMF). The 80/20 rule is about getting some validation that the thing you are building is worth building in the first place - not that it can be done, but that it should be done.
There aren't a ton of specific examples listed, but the images might insinuate some products that the author has in mind. I would just point out that Magic Leap, Humane were both hardware products that spent >5 years in development. They cam out as completed fully finished products that were complete by any standard. The problem wasn't that these products shipped with missing features, it was that nobody wanted what they were selling (see also the Apple Vision Pro, which is technically phenomenal in terms of design/engineering/manufacturing, but not really very useful). These products did the opposite of the Lean Methodology and show the risk of trying something brand new and not validating the assumptions as quickly as possible.
Well, yes in some cases. In lots of others it's just another implementation of existing software. Oh, you're building another food delivery app, because the current one is missing feature xxx?
This doesn't make them bad, the world is full of different contexts, and providing a solution tailored to a specific context is valuable.
But most startups are not "novel". Even in a novel space (like self driving cars) there are a bunch of companies in that space (basically competing for VC money. )
I'm very much in the MVP camp - if anything I'm more extreme- I'm in the "show me a market and how to reach them before coding anything" camp.
Magic leap had like a 30 degree FOV and no software. It was a dev kit, literally. The consumer version was never released IIRC
Also, I don’t think you argued against the main thesis which is something like “startup land is too good at the first 80% of a product, but not the latter 20%”
That rings true for me. Our industry is not known for robustness and quality. There is robust and high quality software out there, but most of it is not.
[1] For example, the liquid metal fast breeder reaxctor https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazi...
[2] https://kguttag.com/ tells you just how hard it is
[3] Apple Vision Pro is a refined if overly expensive product that takes a different approach to the same end and consumers were indifferent
So they released both a vertical slice and a horizontal slice then.
I feel like it's completely the opposite. A new game doesn't need to "replace" old games. People have played those games. It only needs to be new and good enough to get people's attention.
But tools usually are replacing something existing. Tech that actually creates new possibilities is few and far between. The internet is one example of that. Can you think of another? I think most new tech is aiming to replace older tech that is currently used for those problems.
man, really? 99% of software is basically glorified CRUD view for some DB. it's nothing novel.
If we venture outside of corporate software: most startups do not create anything novel - they just monetize existing businesses in a different(usually more predatory) way, or do X but digital. both usually go for 'virtual monopoly' by: offering service(never a product!) for free -> capture the market -> enshittify -> new startups repeats the cycle.
The actual novelty where you find a need that is unserved is sub 0.1% of them.
In reality you aim for product that fits current buzzword meta for funding.
I do 100% agree that product-market-fit is probably the thing you should try to get ASAP though.
When we were in Rome and exited the Colosseum, it started raining. Some random dude walked to us and sold us an umbrella. Great business, both of us were better off.
Deleted Comment
His qualm is with companies developing what amounts to a good demo (whether you call it MVP, prototype, Beta product, etc), validate their hypothesis but then call it a finished product. Validation is supposed to be just that, validation. Instead he's arguing companies call that initial validation market success, then relabel the demo a working product, warts and all.
And, you're correct in saying the Vision Pro didn't flop because it wasn't developed properly. It flopped because no one wants what it has to offer, and that's a different problem from what the author describes
Since the comparison was made to games development, I think the closer equivalent is an early access release where you're generally paying for a WIP game at a lower price. Money changes hands, you get access to product in return, but there's no guarantee that it would ever be 'finished' or even what 'finished' might mean.
Dead Comment
Vertical slice (VS) is a type of beautiful corner — this is done at production quality.
The purpose of FP is to prove the game loop and that a game is worth producing — that it is viable, or you could say that it has reached the minimum viable state. The purpose of VS is to try out the entire production process and test burndowns, etc.
I can confirm, as someone who has worked in games for decades, that the author understands it correctly.
FP in automotive would be a prototype car, VS in automotive would be the first factory produced car. VS in games often marks the end of pre-production and a shift of priorities from iterating and experimenting to producing bulk content. MVP would be much earlier.
Then in another sense, MVP is already marketable and commercially viable. But a game is that neither at VS nor FP. So if you look at MVP from that perspective, it is not even close to either VS or FP. It would be like somewhere beyond around alpha. In any case, MVP != VS :)
The MVP concept doesn’t work with game production that well because it’s a hit driven industry where most of the costs go into producing the hit. Like in movies, music, TV and book publishing — there are many stages of green-lighting before a product is first made available to the market as going from zero to market is where the bulk of the costs are. Going zero to market MVP as the first green-light check would be quite expensive ($50M for market leading VR/handheld, $100M for market leading console and Windows games minimum spent by the time a game is shown to the players) and risky. So instead, we start green-lighting and reviewing the prototype when <$2M is spent in most cases.
A vertical slice is not an MVP because people would never consider it minimally viable. It's a tiny product but it's completely polished and it's for a consumer of one: the publisher.
[1]: https://grumpygamer.com/vertical_slice/
In other software, MVP is what you can go live with to all of your customers (often replacing something existing and omitting half the existing features to much chagrin).
It's the detail, the little touches, that result in the comparative advantage in the market - not the shared 80% ( most chairs have 4 legs, seat and back - that 80% isn't what you compete on ).
They're "finished" with it now though, after years of weekly updates they've gone quiet in November. But, they're also working on a new game.
I have not seen the code bases from the inside but I would be very surprised if not a lot of it has been touched in recent years.
I firmly believe any sense of accomplishment comes from what you give players, not how ”complete” your implementation is.
This is why software development _as a job_ sucks, and sucks deeply: how often do you get to put the icing on the cake, and put a ribbon on it, and get a final effort that matches what you were able to envision ?
"Job" satisfaction is for _hobbyist_ software development. Capitalism generates crap software.
In a software job I rarely have to do that to get paid, I can spend most of my days on the easy stuff that gets far enough. The pay is good enough that I can spend my time outside of work doing what I want and put in the effort to grind through the last 20% and really feel proud if the end result.
This may be why so many software developers gravitate to wood working. If you have the time to put in the effort for that last 20% its very noticeable and satisfying.
As opposed to state-funded software development, which is renowed for its high quality and innovation.
E.g. Excel or git, or their potential eventual successors. Former and latter has largely being the same commands and feature set used by 99% of users since V1. They are now old, storied projects with enhancements and features/improvements that go decades long, and even inspired or spun out new products/projects out of the ideas built within.
For the article itself, Pareto exists as a reminder that work expended is rarely if ever equal to results produced. There are instances where it pays off. But you always pay a price. Make sure you're willing to pay that price.
Sometimes a chair with 3 legs is all you need or care for. That 4th leg might give you more balance in an uneven plane, but I work in a decently flat garage and I'm not paying the premium for that 4th leg.
Medical device control software is not build like that, drone flight control is not build like that, power plant safety is not build like that.
The problem that I noticed in the recent years is: People see the fast dev cycles for non critical software and think they can replicate it in areas where it really does not fit.
I guess that’s how we ended up with Teslas self driving.
I am a bit worried that ai seems to be build like that, using development cycles fit for a convenience appliance for what could be used as a weapon.
Seniority doesn't mean anything if a dev's 20 years has been spent flinging crap over the wall and then wondering how to keep up with all the support tickets being filed.
How does one get onto the "software is suppose to work" career track.
Boring companies that have had IT for a long time; industries like government, taxes, energy, administration, CRM, insurance, pensions, banking, etc. You won't get recruiters knocking on your doorstep to come and work for those though, and you'll possibly be working with 10+ year old tech and development practices.
Agreed.
> drone flight control is not build like that
You obviously haven't been working in the drone industry, have you? Just a guess :-).
45k€ agricultural spraying drone? At least the ones I had the privilege to look at were programmed quite paranoid. Farmers tend to get really pissed if their equipment dies because of software issues.
The few principles I live by are vague to avoid that predicament-
1. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good 2. Under promise, over deliver 3. Graveyards are full of indispensable men
1 took me a long time to really learn
2 In my case, where I've sucked at estimations, it's really not over deliver, but deliver my under promise.
3 is a De Gaulle quote and my favorite - when I think I can't be replaced because I've had an ego boost from a recent accomplishment. Alternatively, it can also be interpreted as 'the world goes on'.
This gets conflated with products that are 80% reliable across all their tasks (LLMs, brittle software). That makes it difficult for users to rely on the product, because occasionally a failure will happen, and the user can’t build a mental model of what works and doesn’t.
Tax prep software for simple returns only is an entire product. Adding support for the other 20% would lose your initial base's interest.
Tax software that aims to solve all problems whose MVP is it handles 80% of people's tax returns is the pareto the author is talking about. But the real complexity is the other 20%.
Pareto as a minimalism process for focused product development is not engineering (good or bad).
Forgetting pareto and believing (or lying) that you are truly 80% of the way there is a big problem in engineering and funding. The author is correct in that.
I was, and still am, prepared to use a large number of things that aren't perfect - housing, transport, furniture, computers, clothing, FOOD, and more.
edit: Added Food, I don't get the best chef on the planet to prepare my meals every day, or any chef for the most part, not only because I don't have the money, but also because I don't value that sort of thing enough - I'm more than happy with my own cooking for the most part.
My PM did not take the correct lesson away from the encounter.