Hey everyone-

Lately I’ve been thinking about one of the most misunderstood terms in product development: the Minimum Viable Product, or MVP. Looking back at the products I’ve worked on, misconceptions about the MVP concept are usually at the root of any product friction. Whether you’re a solopreneur or managing an army of stakeholders, it’s way too easy to split hairs about what is both minimal and viable. Smart people have already spilled a ton of ink on MVP critiques and variations (and yes, I have my favorites), but my goal today isn’t to introduce a fun new acronym. Sure, I’ll MENTION the acronyms, but what I want to get across today is that all of these variations exist on a spectrum. At the end of the day, picking an acronym is just deciding when you flip the switch from “in development” to “launched” — it’s somewhat arbitrary, but still important. My goal is to give you a way to think about your product opportunity, so that you can get past the conceptual dissonance and create a safe space to build your product. You know, the fun part.

Let’s dive in.

Protecting the New

One of my favorite books is Creativity, Inc, by Ed Catmull, the co-founder of Pixar. There are a ton of nuggets in that book, but a piece of wisdom that has stuck with me is how he thinks about protecting ideas:

Originality is fragile. And, in its first moments, it’s often far from pretty. This is why I call early mock-ups of our films “ugly babies.” They are not beautiful, miniature versions of the adults they will grow up to be. They are truly ugly: awkward and unformed, vulnerable and incomplete. They need nurturing—in the form of time and patience—in order to grow… Our job is to protect our babies from being judged too quickly. Our job is to protect the new.

When I think about all the different “Minimum Product” variations, a lot of what these frameworks are doing is trying to protect the new. One of the scariest moments when you’re building is your product’s first formal contact with the market. There’s always a risk that customers will hate it, and it can be terrifying to contemplate a bad review tanking your business. In this context, you can think about the acronyms as tools for deciding when it’s “safe” to launch your product. You’re trying to create the best possible environment for success, and mitigate the risk of a bad experience. The rub is that you need user feedback in order to build great products. The decision you’re making as a builder is how much feedback you need (and how you will get it) before your product is ready for its big debut moment — when you turn on the marketing machine and release it into the wild. Essentially, you’re designing a safe space for your product’s development, and there are a number of different tactics that you can employ (beta releases, pilot programs, etc) to do that. My goal today is to share how I think about a product’s market environment, and how I use that to design safe spaces from first principles.

Minimum is a Spectrum

I like to think about the MVP family on a fidelity spectrum — at one end you have your experiments, and at the other you have highly polished products. Your product will most likely go through all of these stages at some point, and there’s a good chance you’ll need to produce several iterations at each of them. Depending on the complexity of your problem space, you will probably conduct multiple experiments before you have your MVP, and you may need several MVPs before you have something you can consider “marketable” or “lovable”.

One way to think about this is to bring it back to the Double Diamond^[1]. The Solution Diamond has that “Do I release?” decision point at the end of it — the various MVP frameworks are trying to help you figure out how you answer that question. Is your product “complete” and ready to be released when it’s Viable, Marketable, or Lovable? The most important thing is to be honest with yourself (and your team) about where you put the release bar, so that you can design a safe space that enables you to get your essential customer feedback and create the best possible environment for your launch.

Enter the 2x2

If you’ve ever talked about product with me, you probably know that I love a 2x2 grid (aka the Eisenhower Matrix). It’s one of the simplest and most effective methods for prioritization and organization, and I think about it often enough that I’ve been toying with dedicating an article to its finer points (as you can imagine, my wife is riveted). The basic idea is that you create two axes with two factors that you want to prioritize against — the classic version maps importance to urgency, while a common product variation maps value to effort. Plotting the items you need to prioritize against those axes helps you identify the best way to handle them — for example, Eisenhower used his version to decide when to delegate and when to dig in.

When I start thinking about a safe space, I like to draw a 2x2 of customer impact and risk, where:

• customer impact is a measure of how much solving your problem will help your customer. High impact products and features create the most value for customers, and in turn (should) drive your business.
• risk is how easy it will be to solve your customer’s problem. There are multiple factors under the hood here, including things like technical feasibility (do you know how to build this) and the risk the customer is taking by using your product. I tend to put a little more weight on the customer risk — if I am operating in a space where I know exactly how to build something but a bug could cost my customer millions of dollars, I will assess it as high risk (at least for this purpose).

Once you have this, you can look at your problem space and figure out which of the four quadrants it fits into. Here’s how I think about each box, and what that means for your product’s safe space.

High Impact, Low Risk

Generally these are products that you know will be highly valuable to your customer and that you’re confident you can nail. I tend to see these in a few different flavors:

• enhancements that are highly requested and very easy to execute — think launching a Dark Mode for your app
• new products that have significant upside over the status quo — the classic example is the first spreadsheet app, VisiCalc. The only alternative was paper and pencil, which was so inferior that customers were willing to deal with learning curves and bugs to use the new product.
• products with upside and low switching costs — Calendly is a nice example of this, where you could instantly (and freely) upgrade your scheduling process without changing your calendar app. Wordle is another good example of this from the entertainment side of things.

In these situations, I generally try to optimize for speed to market. Your probably have a thorough understanding of the customer need and the solution is obvious, so you should try to get the product to your customers as fast as possible. For this type of product, I will generally rely on the core team’s knowledge of the customer problem to refine the experience and get it as close as possible to ready. Once it’s ready, I generally use a wide beta release over a short period of time to clean up any rough edges, then push the product into a formal launch.

High Impact, High Risk

Situations where the customer need is high but you’re unsure of your ability to nail the solution can occur in a few different types of product areas:

• pure R&D / new market categories — as the name implies, you’re pretty much researching whether the thing is even possible. Companies developing new AI models or building new blockchain models sit in this camp.
• highly regulated industries — finance and health care are prime examples. In fact, most of my work at Flatiron Health fell in this category. We were building products that would help assess the efficacy and safety of medical treatments, so our customers (pharma companies) faced major legal and financial risk if one of our datasets misfired.
• products with high switching costs — think situations where your customers have to migrate an existing, involved process to a new platform.

When building products in this quadrant, I try to design a safe space that enables a lot of customer feedback early on. Since you’re unsure of your ability to solve the problem, you want to derisk your solution as often as possible before you officially bring it to market. I like to use design partner programs or pilots in these spaces, because they get your customer on your team. These types of programs, if incentivized correctly, make your customer feel like they’re building the product with you — this makes them much more amenable when they find bugs and forthcoming with their feedback.

Low Impact, Low Risk

These tend to be minor customer problems that are really easy to solve — the low-priority items that a team can bang out quickly. Think bug fixes / edge cases, cosmetic updates, or internal tools that don’t have a material impact on your customer value. Since they are low value, I generally keep a backlog of these issues and will batch them together when the team has a light week. I tend not to worry as much about user feedback given the low risk and value, so I’ll rely on the team for tuning the fix and batch release them.

Low Impact, High Risk

While this article is focused on designing safe spaces, I’m going to sneak in some prioritization advice too. If you’re considering a product or feature in this quadrant — don’t. Something that won’t drive much value and has a low likelihood of success is not worth the effort. Focus somewhere else.

From my experience, creating a safe space for your product’s development is about balancing the need for user feedback with managing risks. Mapping your product on the impact-risk spectrum has helped me tailor my approach and increase the chances of success. The goal isn’t just to launch—it’s to launch well. Whether it’s running beta tests, partnering with design customers, or iterating based on internal feedback, I’ve found that protecting those “ugly babies” long enough for them to grow is crucial. So, when you’re navigating MVP debates or dealing with stakeholder friction, consider how you can nurture your ideas. It’s been invaluable for me, and I hope it can help you too.