Prototype the UI Before Building an MVP

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2022-01-23 14:00:07

Being a heavy user of software products, I’ll sometimes have an idea of a product I want. After a brief incubation period, I’ll get the urge to build the damn thing. Being a software developer, I always succumb to this urge and invest a lot of time and effort into building at least an MVP of the product. Most of the time, unfortunately, I lose interest in the product just after playing with it for a while. Then, thinking that I didn’t actually want it, I’ll go about burying it in my Failed Projects Graveyard. This pattern persisted more than I’m willing to admit.

The problem is that users (including us, developers) won’t know what they want until they see it and feel it. Common sense tells us that the solution is to build and iterate on an MVP to find out what users want, right? But building an MVP is not as cheap as it appears to be. Neither is iterating on an MVP. Think about all the technical decisions you must make and the technical debt you must carry. Software is always less flexible than we hoped.

Notice also that after investing in building an MVP it’s extremely hard to let it go once you find out users don’t actually want it. So, you tend to spend on it much more than you should. (Perhaps that’s the reason that many bad movies are produced.) If you are spending someone else’s money, you may accept it as a grim fact of life. Otherwise, you may want to consider other options.