The MVP mindset
The most challenging aspect of my teaching is not design. It is letting go. However, the hardest room to teach is not a classroom. It is a boardroom. In the Digital Product Design workshop I facilitate, there is always a moment, usually around hour three, when someone realizes that their favorite feature is not essential. That is nice. Users might enjoy this. But that, without it, the product still works.
This is the moment I wait for in a workshop with designers. With stakeholders and C-level teams, that moment rarely arrives independently. It has to be engineered. Quietly, without most people in the room realizing it, is one of the most important things a designer actually does.
Here is what I have observed across years of working with both design teams and senior leadership: the Minimum Viable Product conversation fails almost every time it is framed as a product decision. It succeeds when framed as a business decision.
Stakeholders do not resist the MVP because they are concerned about its features. They resist it because every feature on the list represents a conversation someone had, a promise someone made, or a priority someone fought for. Cutting it feels like a loss. Nobody walks into a boardroom wanting to lose.
The designer's role in this room is not to present a solution. But to reframe the question.
Not "which features do we cut?" but "which features, right now, will tell us the most about whether this product is solving the right problem?" Not "what is the minimum we can ship?" but "what is the smallest version of this that is still honest, honest to the user's actual need, and honest about what we do not yet know?"
This reframing changes everything. This is because it repositions the MVP not as a compromise but as the most intelligent first move available. It is not shipping less. It is shipped deliberately.
The best designers I know and the best products I have worked on share one quality: ruthless clarity about what matters most at the moment. Not eventually. Not in version three. Now.
But that clarity does not exist in isolation. It must be communicated upward to people who are under pressure to show progress, justify budgets, and satisfy boards. The designer who cannot do that, who can define the MVP beautifully on a canvas but cannot defend it in a room full of people whose incentives point in the opposite direction, will watch their best thinking get overridden every time. This is why I believe that the role of the designer in any product conversation is fundamentally rhetorical. You are not just the person who knows the right answer. You are responsible for making the right answer feel safe enough to be chosen.
Living with imperfections is not a failure. It is professionalism. It is how you ship something real instead of perfecting something imaginary. This is how you build the kind of trust with stakeholders that means the next conversation, the one about version two, the one where you ask for more, goes differently.
The MVP is not the end of the ambition. This is where ambition is tested against reality. This test should be performed early. What is one feature you have cut from a product that you still think about?
