Tech Takes the Pareto Principle Too Far – Bobby Lockhart
There’s a reason video games build what’s called a ‘vertical slice’. If you’re not familiar, a vertical slice is a single playable area, with all mechanics, final art, vfx, sfx, music, etc. Basically, a little piece of exactly how the finished game will look and feel and play. The vertical slice is what game developers show publishers and investors to demonstrate not only that the game itself is going to be good, but also that the game development team has all the skills necessary to deliver the game to the level of polish the market demands.
Contrast this with the tech industry, which submits for approval an ‘MVP’. A minimum viable product is the absolute least one can create that someone will pay for. It seems tech investors have gotten very used to evaluating MVPs, and rightly so — they need to be able to assess the potential of these prototypes so they can decide which are worth their investment. The problem is that MVPs don’t actually establish whether the team /could/ get to a finished product, and in practice many can’t.
Recently, getting VC funding has become such an end in itself that engineers in the tech industry, centered around Silicon Valley, have optimized their skillset for prototyping. There’s an oft quoted idea called the Pareto Principle, which states that 20% of the effort produces 80% of the results. So, if you can just prioritize the right 20%, you can get most of the way towards the desired outcome. The whole sector has become great at this, nearly to the exclusion of all else. And who can blame them? Look at the inverse — doing 80% of the work to complete only 20% of the job doesn’t sound like much fun.
