Saturday, November 5, 2011

Minimum Viable Product Development: Steve Jobs Didn't Do It

As popular as the approach seems to be, one wonders whether Steve Jobs, former Apple CEO, ever bothered with development using the "minimum viable product" approach. 


One can safely assume he did not, as minimum viable product development requires some amount of end user feedback about the prototype.

The whole point of designing using this approach is that a development team collects the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort. Jobs never seemed to think that consumers could provide much valuable input about products that solved problems they didn't know they had.


In this, as in other fundamental ways, Steve Jobs broke the rules. Keep in mind that the point of a minimum viable product approach is not to create a "minimum" commercial product, but rather to quickly test a concept with real users, at low cost, to validate an implementation.

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