What I think the author should have used is a car. First, we design and test the suspension, then the wheels, then the brakes, etc until we have a working car from the ground up. Then we sell a lot of them.
The OS / game engine /car example is frightening because you have no intermediate value until the whole thing comes together. hiccups propegate.
However, an iterative approach would create a minumum feature version first.
A car with no suspension, 25 HP, and one seat. An OS with virtually no drivers, targetting single arch, bad scheduler, single filesystem, and single user.
These are, in aerospace analogies, testbeds in which you validate your long term vision while producing real things that can be sold, hyped, or used to look for improvements and bad assumptioms before the final product is produced.
I completely agree with your statement that markets become saturated with Min Viable Products ... but that is what forces iteration. I agree with the author (and this isn't new knowledge) that iteratively buidling a better thing by expanding a pre existing thing helps you capture and scale.
My opinion is this probably gets hard once that thing gets big, and starts to feel clunky, and thats where the big companaies do a "re-engineering" with a waterfall-like model. They can afford to take time to design soup-to-nuts because they are still selling the iterative MVP mutant that got them to dominance. Different strokes for different folks.
Don't forget - the product is also the factory - it is the factory that Musk has been iterating towards - they built the car very manually to start with.
What I think the author should have used is a car. First, we design and test the suspension, then the wheels, then the brakes, etc until we have a working car from the ground up. Then we sell a lot of them.
The OS / game engine /car example is frightening because you have no intermediate value until the whole thing comes together. hiccups propegate.
However, an iterative approach would create a minumum feature version first.
A car with no suspension, 25 HP, and one seat. An OS with virtually no drivers, targetting single arch, bad scheduler, single filesystem, and single user.
These are, in aerospace analogies, testbeds in which you validate your long term vision while producing real things that can be sold, hyped, or used to look for improvements and bad assumptioms before the final product is produced.
I completely agree with your statement that markets become saturated with Min Viable Products ... but that is what forces iteration. I agree with the author (and this isn't new knowledge) that iteratively buidling a better thing by expanding a pre existing thing helps you capture and scale.
My opinion is this probably gets hard once that thing gets big, and starts to feel clunky, and thats where the big companaies do a "re-engineering" with a waterfall-like model. They can afford to take time to design soup-to-nuts because they are still selling the iterative MVP mutant that got them to dominance. Different strokes for different folks.