Maximum Viable Products are those that have grown and accreted so many features and so much functionality that they collapse under their own weight.
Or really, just before that. When they’re at the largest that is actually viable as a product.
When products get that “large” or try to do that much, they are ripe for disruption by a simpler solution that offers a compelling twist.
These newer, simpler products may become quite successful as well, and soon start adding features and growing until years later when they are the established product with too many features that needs to be disrupted.
When creating a minimum viable product, we often overestimate what’s required. The whole point of formalizing the concept was to help people strip even more away from what they thought they needed before shipping.
Imagining
Conversely, when imagining a maximum viable product, I believe we will underestimate how much can fit into a product.
As an example, let’s look at Microsoft Word. It is a maximum viable product. There are so many features, so many nooks and crannies, so many ways it can be used across so many domains of knowledge, that it’s really quite breathtaking. It’s also no wonder that new apps like Google Docs came along to disrupt them.
But we’re not talking about disruption. We’re talking about how large it is.
Not the code base, not the customer base. Just the functionality.
Do you think anyone, developers or customers could have imagined back in 1983 (or 1989 if you just want to consider the Windows version) such disparate features as ligatures, change tracking, watermarks, ink to math, built in voice dictation, and the list goes on. Although I never worked on Word, I did work on Outlook and on the shared codebase between the office products. There are huge areas of Word I know I don’t know anything about.
And here we are over a decade since the Office apps adopted the ribbon, which was primarily a new UI paradigm designed to help people deal with the feature bloat that already existed and was recognized.
It’s Impossible
And yet, imagining a maximum viable version of your product is super helpful, even if you’ll fail at it.
But don’t imagine a maximally successful version of your product. Just think about how much it could do, how much functionality it could contain, how much it could ease a single person’s life, if it had every imaginable feature and they all worked reasonably well together.
Since this background took a while, let’s save the real work for tomorrow.
Until then, think about it: what is a maximum viable product in the personal planning workshop space?