What Teenagers and MVP have in common

Teenage children can be the classic MVP’s (Minimal Viable Products) in action. Here’s why:

1. They tend to be  self deterministic
2. They tend to experiment constantly
3. They don’t attempt to predict the future but learn from their experiments
4. They typically have no endstate in mind that they wish to be made explicit
5. They have courage to outline their path determined by their feedback
6. They have faith in the outcome even if the outcome is unknown

Ok, so I made a lot of that up. But hear me out…

Teenagers can the quintessential examples of MVP’s in progress. If you have one in your house and you want to understand more about MVP.  Observe and Learn from them. They can teach you wonderful insights into known, knowns and unknown, unknowns. Even more, you will have insight to the  ‘knowns I wish I could now be unknown’. Something I’m not aware the Cynefin model caters for?

As a finale, here’s a voyeuristic view into what my teenagers do right now…

A post shared by @nikolai.charrett on Feb 12, 2017 at 1:55am PST

— love your work boys…

Update: Since I wrote this, I’ve thought a bit deeper on the topic. To some degree we are all MVP’s regardless of age. To some degree we are all completed products, but also we’re often minimum versions of the end state. At least I am. I’m still trying to figure out who I want to be, what I might want to do, and what that might look like.