MVPs, but mine are bigger than yours

I am not against MVPs. Shipping the smallest version of an idea, putting it in front of people, learning from what comes back — that is still the right loop. I follow it. I just notice that when I run that loop, the M in my MVPs ends up larger than the M in most other people’s.

UmtilSuite is the clearest example. It is, by my own honest accounting, a minimum viable thing. I cut everything that did not need to be in the first version. And the result was still a multi-tool suite, because the smallest viable answer to “what does this product need to do” was not a single feature — it was a small but coherent set of them.

Tsukime is a different category. Tsukime is not an MVP. It is a deliberately big project, built slowly, and I am not pretending otherwise.

I think the trap with the “ship small” rule is taking it as an aesthetic — like the smaller the launch, the better the engineer. The actual rule is “ship the smallest version that is still a real answer to the problem.” Sometimes that is one screen. Sometimes that is a suite. The discipline is being honest about which one you are looking at, and not shrinking past the point where the thing stops working.