In the fast moving world of SaaS (Software as a Service) development, Product Managers, Sales people, and CEOs talk about MVP--Most/Minimally Viable/Valuable Product.
What do we need to launch to make money as quickly as possible?
This is a reasonable venture. Companies are in business to serve customers and sell products.
The concept makes a lot of sense--Get the simplest functionality out in the market and see how customers respond. That's the goal. And, everyone agrees (at least in principle) that once a product is out the company can quickly react and iterate towards a winning feature.
The one wrench in the mix is that building software takes time and a company's perception of a customer's needs is often transient. So, either MVPs are never defined enough for Engineering to adequately develop or Sales and Product constantly tinker with the requirements forcing innumerable tiny, yet often technically complicated architectural changes.
The process of building an MVP is often very painful to the actual developers who have to sit through meeting after meeting of requirement alterations only to return to their desks to hack up the elegant code they designed for the original spec.
No one would argue that a business should launch the best products to fit their customer's needs. But, it should not be done at the cost of developer sanity. There is real Value in actually delivering software.
Product Managers ask "What can de deliver in the shortest amount of time that represents value?" It would be nice if they ask this question to both sales and engineering at the same time, equally respecting their responses. A Valuable product is one that doesn't irreparably harm the development team for the long term while trying to wow an incessantly fickle consumer in the short term.
In the last 25 years of my career as a software developer, I have seen more MVPs fail to get out of development than actually reach beta. This because of the need to "launch the right thing", rather than "launch and iterate on something."
No one wants to constantly deliver products that customers don't want. But, trust your people to come up with something that is truly minimal and deliverable. Give it the space and energy to launch.
Get it out there, and let them iterate in a sane way.