The projector fan is a low-frequency hum that vibrates the back of my molars, a mechanical persistent whine that feels more honest than the presentation unfolding on the whiteboard. Gary, our lead Product Manager, is gesturing with a laser pointer at a slide titled ‘Vision 2024: The Velocity Quarter.’ On the screen, there is a list of 13 new features, each labeled with the acronym MVP in bold, red letters. It looks less like a roadmap and more like a ransom note addressed to the engineering department. The air in the room is stale, smelling of over-roasted coffee and the collective exhaustion of 3 years spent building things that were meant to be ‘temporary.’
Gary is mid-sentence, talking about ‘rapid iteration cycles’ and ‘leveraging lean methodologies’ to capture the market share by the end of the next 93 days. I’m staring at a smudge on the window, thinking about a commercial I saw this morning for a brand of laundry detergent. It featured a father washing his toddler’s grass-stained shirt, and for some reason, I started weeping. Not a gentle tear, but a genuine, chest-heaving sob. My partner asked if I was okay, and I couldn’t explain that the detergent’s promise of ‘restoring things to their original state’ felt like a fantasy more profound than any science fiction. In my world, nothing is ever restored. We just slap a new coat of ‘viable’ paint over the rot and move to the next slide.
233 Critical bugs exist from previous MVPs. The database is currently held together by three cron jobs and a prayer.
The Elevator Inspector’s Truth
‘Viable’ implies the capacity for sustained life. If I find 3 frayed wires, I don’t suggest we ‘learn from the failure’ while people are still riding the car. I shut the whole thing down. People nowadays are obsessed with the start of things. We want the ribbon cutting, not the structural integrity test.
– Iris M.-L., Elevator Inspector (33 Months Ago)
I think about Iris M.-L. often. She is an elevator inspector I met at a transit hub 33 months ago when I was stuck between floors for what felt like an eternity. Iris doesn’t care about ‘lean’ or ‘agile.’ To Iris, a ‘Minimum Viable Elevator’ is a box that doesn’t plummet to the basement. But she understands a nuance that we’ve intentionally forgotten: ‘viable’ implies the capacity for sustained life. If she finds 3 frayed wires in a control panel, she doesn’t suggest that we ‘learn from the failure’ while people are still riding the car. she shuts the whole thing down. She told me once, while wiping grease from her hands with a rag that had seen better decades, that people nowadays are obsessed with the start of things. No one wants to talk about the 133 years of maintenance required to keep a building standing. We want the ribbon cutting, not the structural integrity test.
In our industry, we have perverted the MVP concept into a grotesque caricature of its original intent. It was supposed to be the smallest possible thing we could build to *learn* something. It was a scientific instrument, a probe sent into the dark to see if there was solid ground. Instead, it has become ‘the most we can get away with not building by the deadline.’ It’s a loophole. It’s an excuse for mediocrity wrapped in the language of Silicon Valley efficiency. We ship half-baked features and call them ‘v1.0,’ promising the customers that ‘v1.1’ will include the actual functionality they need. But v1.1 never comes. Because by the time we finish v1.0, Gary has already promised the board 13 new MVPs for the next 93-day cycle.
The Interest Rate of Mediocrity
Focus was on elegance
Focus is now on completion
This creates a specific kind of psychological erosion. I’ve noticed it in myself first. I used to care about the elegance of a function, the way a database schema could mirror the reality of the world it was meant to represent. Now, I just look for the shortest path to ‘done.’ I am building a city of shanties, knowing that the first heavy rain will wash them all away, but comforted by the fact that I’ll be assigned to build a new shanty in a different district before the clouds even gather. We are creating technical debt at a literal interest rate of 83%, and the collectors are already knocking at the door. We treat our software like a disposable commodity, forgetting that the people using it are often building their lives and businesses on top of our ‘minimal’ foundations.
There is a fundamental dishonesty in treating software as a series of disconnected experiments rather than a holistic ecosystem. We fix the symptoms-the slow load times, the flickering UI-but we never address the systemic rot beneath. It is a bit like treating a chronic, debilitating health condition with nothing but colorful band-aids and optimistic slogans. In the world of wellness, people are starting to realize that you can’t just patch a body forever; you need to look at the root causes, the underlying terrain. I recently read about the approach at White Rock Naturopathic, where the focus is on the whole person and the actual source of the ailment rather than just the outward manifestation of pain. We need a ‘Naturopathic’ movement for software-a return to the idea that the health of the whole system matters more than the ‘velocity’ of a single feature.
The Cost of Incompleteness
Payment Gateway
Swallowed transaction data.
Learned Data
Users were angry.
Rewards Dashboard
The next priority.
I remember a project from 3 years ago. We were building a payment gateway. The MVP was ‘viable’ in the sense that it could process a credit card 73% of the time. The other 23% of the time, it just swallowed the transaction into a black hole. We ‘learned’ that people were angry when their money disappeared. Riveting data. But instead of fixing the transaction logic, we were told to move on to ‘MVP 2: The Rewards Dashboard.’ To this day, there are 163 lines of code in that gateway with comments that say // TODO: FIX THIS LATER OR WE ALL DIE. We haven’t died yet, but I can feel the ghost of those transactions every time I commit new code.
Iris M.-L. once showed me her inspection notebook. It was filled with tiny, precise drawings of pulleys and governors. She told me that she sees the same 43 mistakes over and over again. They are almost always the result of someone trying to save a few dollars on the ‘invisible’ parts of the machine. The parts the passengers don’t see. Software is almost entirely ‘invisible’ parts. When we ship a feature that is barely functional, we are telling the user that their time, their data, and their trust are the ‘invisible’ costs we are willing to spend to meet our internal metrics.
The Cardboard IKEA Furniture
I find myself back in the meeting room, Gary still talking. He’s now on slide 33, showing a chart where ‘Innovation’ is an arrow pointing straight up at a 63-degree angle. I want to stand up and tell him about the detergent commercial. I want to tell him that I cried because I miss the feeling of something being truly clean, truly finished, truly whole. I want to tell him that the developers are burnt out not because they hate work, but because they hate building trash. We are craftsmen being forced to build IKEA furniture out of cardboard and spit, and we are being told to celebrate our ‘speed.’
Minimal Ships
Great Thing
Complicity and The Cumulative Cost
There is a contradiction here that I haven’t quite resolved. I’m the one who suggested the ‘Speed to Market’ metric 13 months ago. I’m part of the problem. I’m an architect who keeps handing out hammers and telling people to ignore the foundation. I admit this mistake to myself every morning, usually around 8:03 AM, as I log into the ticket tracker and see the 333 unread notifications. We are all complicit in the cult because the cult is comfortable. It allows us to feel productive without the messy, difficult work of achieving excellence. It’s much easier to ship 13 ‘minimal’ things than one ‘great’ thing.
But the cost is cumulative. It’s the sigh Sam makes every time he opens a pull request. It’s the 23% churn rate of our customers who got tired of being beta testers for a product they’re paying full price for. It’s the way the code base has become so fragile that a single CSS change in the header can break the checkout flow for 43% of mobile users. We are living in a house of cards, and Gary is currently trying to add a 13th story.
As the meeting ends, Gary claps his hands together. The sound is like a gunshot. ‘Great energy today, team. Let’s make this the best quarter yet.’ We all file out, a procession of ghosts. I walk past the breakroom and see a poster on the wall. It’s a picture of a mountain with the word ‘EXCELLENCE’ at the bottom. Someone has crossed out ‘EXCELLENCE’ and written ‘VIABLE’ in black permanent marker. I want to laugh, but I think if I start, I might not stop for 43 minutes. Instead, I go back to my desk, open bug #1033, and start looking for a way to patch a hole that was supposed to be fixed 3 years ago. The cycle continues, minimal and hollow, until the next commercial makes me cry or the elevator finally stops between floors for good.