STOP Launching Garbage: Why "MVP" Doesn't Mean "Broken"

The Agile Shield

Before you throw stones at me while holding the Agile Manifesto: Calm down.

I am not advocating for a return to the Waterfall model, where we locked ourselves in a room for months to launch a "perfect product" full of features nobody asked for. Working software in the hands of the user is still the golden rule.

The problem is the widespread, distorted interpretation of this rule. Too many teams are institutionalizing "Deadline-Driven Gambiarra" (a wonderful Brazilian term for a hacky workaround) and labeling it an MVP.

The Trap of the "Permanent Temporary"

It’s the old trap of the //TODO: Refactor later comment in the code.

Anyone with experience in technology knows the cruel truth: there is nothing more permanent than a "temporary solution." That patched-up code you push today just to hit a release date becomes the untouchable legacy monolith that will haunt your team for the next five years.

The Golden Rule of Velocity

In two decades on the road, I’ve learned that if you need to gain speed, there is only one variable you should cut: SCOPE. Never QUALITY.

A smaller, solid, well-architected product beats a feature-bloated, buggy mess every time.

"But hey, I need to validate my hypothesis fast!"

Yes, you do. But validate it in a controlled environment. Use feature flags. Roll it out to a restricted group of beta users. Deliver a tiny product, but deliver it with excellence. Because once you flip the switch to open production, the game is on for real, and first impressions matter.

The High-Interest Loan of Technical Debt

Consciously launching unstable software isn't agility; it's taking out a high-risk loan called Technical Debt. And the bank of real life charges worse interest rates than your credit card:

1. Support Interest: Your best developers spend whole sprints fixing critical bugs instead of creating new value. Your Customer Experience team starts to hate you. The team burns out because they are constantly firefighting instead of building.

(This is where teams stagnate. Instead of growing their skills, they are just patching holes. We built SkillFlux to help teams break this cycle, ensuring they have dedicated paths to learn best practices so they build it right the first time).

2. Churn Interest: The cost of winning back a frustrated customer is astronomical—if it's even possible. Speaking personally as a user, I rarely return to a product that failed me on the first try, no matter how good the "we missed you" email offer is.

From Viable to Lovable

So, my challenge to you for the coming year is this: deliver fewer features, but deliver the few remaining ones with excellence.

We need fewer MVPs and more MLPs (Minimum Lovable Products). Less "eh... at least it basically works" and more "Wow, this is slick, I want to use this more."

Defining what truly constitutes "Minimum" is hard. It requires saying no to a lot of "nice-to-haves." (This is a perfect use case for Decisor.ai. Use structured criteria to rigorously strip away everything that isn't essential to the core value proposition, ensuring the remaining scope is manageable and high-impact).

The "V" in MVP stands for Viable. If it breaks in the user's hand, it is, by definition, not viable.