Don’t Serve Burnt Pizza (And Other Lessons in Building Minimum Lovable Products) | First Round Review

Product builders should aim for lovable, not just viable. Jiaona Zhang (product leader at Dropbox, Airbnb, WeWork and lecturer at Stanford) shares her tactics for building MLPs that win users' hearts.

Consider this analogy that Zhang uses with her students at Stanford: “Say you’re trying to test whether people like pizza. If you serve them burnt pizza, you’re not getting feedback on whether they like pizza. You only know that they don’t like burnt pizza. Similarly, when you’re only relying on the MVP, the fastest and cheapest functional prototype, you risk not actually testing your product, but rather a poor or flawed version of it.”...

Product builders should aim for lovable, not just viable. Jiaona Zhang (product leader at Dropbox, Airbnb, WeWork and lecturer at Stanford) shares her tactics for building MLPs that win users' hearts.

Consider this analogy that Zhang uses with her students at Stanford: “Say you’re trying to test whether people like pizza. If you serve them burnt pizza, you’re not getting feedback on whether they like pizza. You only know that they don’t like burnt pizza. Similarly, when you’re only relying on the MVP, the fastest and cheapest functional prototype, you risk not actually testing your product, but rather a poor or flawed version of it.”...