By the time your MVP is out, is the problem still worth solving? 👀

You need balance the value of a solution today with the value of the solution at a future point when your team is able to deliver something to customers.

Hi everybody - when planning a new feature or a product, it is always a good idea to ask whether the problem you are trying to solve is indeed worth solving. There is another related follow-up question that is more important to answer, and in the following video, I discuss what this is:

There is a vertical format version of the above video on Twitter / X, Tiktok and Youtube if you would like to see it better on your mobile device! 📱

Take Execution Time into Account

The important follow-up question to ask is whether the problem is still worth solving by the time you get your MVP out. A problem worth solving today may not be worth solving 6 months from, 1 year from now, or whenever your team is able to get something out into the hands of users.

This is where a team’s ability to quickly make decisions and execute comes into the focus:

This is also where the historical winds tend to favor small companies with tightly focused teams over larger ones, where large teams often have many cooks without a strong bias for action.

As a product leader, it is your job to balance the value of a solution today with the value of the solution in the future. While nobody likes to hear this, sometimes the pragmatic answer is to acknowledge that our team will not be able to address the market need. This can be balanced by making requests such as faster turnaround times for decisions, bringing in the right people for the core team, more resources (though that is dangerous, more on that in the future! 💀), and so on.

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Till Next Time

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Cheers,
Kirupa 😎