Minimum Viable Artifact
Build your ideas and plans as real-world artifacts to demonstrate their viability.
once you have a Plan, you’re starting to see the whole begin to form, but you don’t know if it works as a whole until you build it.
Ideas and plans are filled with potential, but if that potential is never realized, they’re ultimately useless.
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This pattern comes from the Lean Startup concept of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). In our digital age, many products are not limited by production concerns. In the past, distributing a software update required creating update disks and sending them to all your registered users, but now, updates are delivered in the background via the internet. Or if your product is Software as a Service (SaaS), the software lives on your servers and you can update it daily or hourly if you like.
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So the concept is that you start small, with a minimum product, making sure it actually provides some value to your customer, but not making it too feature-rich at first. You actually build it and make sure that it’s a viable idea. In the case of a product, you’re testing whether it works at a technical level, but you’re also looking to see how the market responds to it. Are people buying it?
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In the context of this book, we may be creating a product that we intend to sell, but we may well be creating something that is not intended for the commercial market. That’s why I’ve changed the name to “artifact” instead of “product.” We still have users that we need to consider, and we still need to be able to create a working prototype, but the emphasis on commercial viability is less of a concern.
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Jumping from a plan to a minimum viable artifact requires moving from an idea to a whole system. In some cases, like in the case of writing this book, it meant taking fairly well-formed ideas and writing them into patterns, with all the required parts in place. The writing didn’t have to be final, but I needed to have something real in each part of the pattern. That gave me a number of patterns, each it’s own minimum viable artifact.
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Later, there was a second phase where I needed to arrange and connect the patterns into a pattern language. That proved to be tricky and took several attempts before I could sense that it was coming together as a whole.
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Buckminster Fuller also talked about the need to build your ideas in the real world, as a way of staying grounded in reality. It’s surprisingly easy to conceive of something that works perfectly in the laboratory of your mind, but fails miserably in the real world.
Therefore:
As quickly as possible, transform your ideas and plans, which exist exclusively in your mind, into a real-world artifact. Your prototype can be a simplified (minimum) version of the artifact you envision, but it should demonstrate its viability as a whole in the physical universe.
Creating a minimum viable artifact for the first time is a difficult step, but it is just the beginning of an iterative process where you go back to checking that your Change Vectors are moving in the right direction, generate Ideas for the next design cycle, Plan the transformations you’ll make to the artifact, then implement the changes