A chef's knife, versatility, and Minimum Viable Product

The approach to defining a minimum viable product (MVP) can be difficult to understand for people who are new to it. The concept itself is a quite dramatic shift from traditional product management: don't focus on the grandiose vision but focus on what is the minimum you should do in order to learn what can bring value immediately. That's right, your main goal is not just to sell your first version, but to learn as much as you can.

With that goal in mind, the initial approach to MVP has to focus on adding the right amount of value-added features without going too deep in any of them rather than focusing and obsessing on one specific feature and making it as rich as possible. Why is that? If you develop a minimum yet significant amount of features, you can 'value probe' a wider array of functionality, which means you can validate more value hypotheses rather than just one. Those that are well received will be great candidates to continue working on them. Those that are not well received can be happily trashed knowing well that you have not invested too much time on it. Simple risk mitigation: don't invest too much on anything without knowing whether it is going to be valuable.

When looking at the overall solution that you are proposing to your users, it pays off to focus early on in versatility (more features though less rich) rather than speciality (one very rich feature).

A good metaphor for those who want to educate others in what is the most ideal MVP approach is to compare the value judgement to the one you go through when you want to learn how to cook and you have to decide which cooking tools you want to use.

If you buy a chef's knife you can do pretty much anything that involves cutting: julienning, chopping, dicing, peeling, mincing, etc. On the other hand you can also buy all these kitchen gadgets that do specific cutting-related tasks really well: apple corer and slicer, mandoline slicer, french fry cutter, grater, onion chopper, avocado slicer, pineapple slicer with wedger, mango splitter, herb mincer, corn stripper, julien slicer, banana slicer, etc.

When getting started with cooking, would you rather have a versatile tool and then start buying specialized tools as you find out what you like to cook and what you cook most often? Or would you have just a few specialized tools to get started with few repetitive plates and then latter on buy a chef's knife so you can cook anything? How many people you know they have kitchen drawers full of cooking gadgets that they never use?

Unless you know for sure what type of dishes you are going to be cooking (maybe you are an exception, love french fries and all you will ever need is a french fry cutter..), most likely you will start with a versatile knife and as you start learning and discovering which dishes you like to cook and how often you cook them, then you will invest in buying more specialized tools that will greatly help your cooking style.