The OSS Minimum Feature Set is Not The Goal

This minimum feature set (sometimes called the “minimum viable product”) causes lots of confusion. Founders act like the “minimum” part is the goal. Or worse, that every potential customer should want it. In the real world not every customer is going to get overly excited about your minimum feature set. Only a special subset of customers will and what gets them breathing heavy is the long-term vision for your product.

The reality is that the minimum feature set is 1) a tactic to reduce wasted engineering hours (code left on the floor) and 2) to get the product in the hands of early visionary customers as soon as possible.

You’re selling the vision and delivering the minimum feature set to visionaries not everyone.”
Steve Blank here.

A recent blog series discussed the use of pilots as an OSS transformation and augmentation change agent.
I have the need for OSS speed
Re-framing an OSS replacement strategy
OSS transformation is hard. What can we learn from open source?

Note that you can replace the term pilot in these posts with MVP – Minimum Viable Product.

The attraction in getting an MVP / pilot version of your OSS into the hands of users is familiarity and momentum. The solution becomes more tangible and therefore needs less documentation (eg architecture, designs, requirement gathering, etc) to describe foreign concepts to customers. The downside of the MVP / pilot is that not every customer will “get overly excited about your minimum feature set.”

As Steve says, “Only a special subset of customers will and what gets them breathing heavy is the long-term vision for your product.” The challenge for all of us in OSS is articulating the long-term vision and making it compelling…. and not just leaving the product in its pilot state (we’ve all seen this happen haven’t we?)

We’ll provide an example of a long-term vision tomorrow.

PS. I should also highlight that the maximum feature set also isn’t the goal either.

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