MVP, Old Sport

21 July 2026 The word “doctor” meant “teacher” in Latin. The meaning spent a few centuries drifting from the person who instructs you to the person who examines you. That drift is the fate waiting for “test and learn”. Anna Goss has a great post about the Riskiest Assumption Test here: From the RAT to the Magenta Book. “It had long since felt like MVP had lost its way in the five years since The Lean Startup had come out. I can’t find it in myself to go and remember all of the many different arguments around what is an MVP, definitions of what it means, how to scope and test it, but the phrase jumped the shark, and the RAT turned up into a wider product environment that was desperate for a new way of talking about validating propositions, starting small, and testing as you go.” How MVP felt to me, managing a software product in 200x was: the MV in “minimum viable product” meant that the market will decide if the product is minimally viable. You’d ship, see what the market thinks, hmm…