滑板 (#3 – Skateboards)

Comic Agilé 漫畫原創作者的話

A well-known metaphor for creating Minimum Viable Products is the skateboard that evolves into a scooter, bike and, finally, a car. The idea is that, when the customer asks for a car, we should ask him ‘why’. The answer could be ‘because I want to go from A to B’, so we identify how to solve this problem with minimum effort, namely creating a skateboard, and enable a feedback loop between the team and customer to ensure that the skateboard evolves appropriately.

If teams, POs and customers fail (for whatever reasons) to implement the MVP in a way where iterative development is possible, they risk ending up with too many skateboards that are thrown away. It is quite expensive to create a scooter or bike from scratch if we cannot further develop the existing skateboard into the next increment of the product.

Please note that here, we are not talking about Set-Based Design or similar approaches where “throwing away” is actually positive and encouraged.

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創造「最低可行產品 (MVP)」的眾所皆知比喻是從滑板演變成踏板車、腳踏車、最後是汽車。 這個想法是，當客戶要求要一部車子的時候，我們應該要問「為什麼」。客戶的答案可能會是「因為我想從 A 點到 B 點」，在了解目的後，我們可以找出如何以最省力的方式解決問題。就像是先製作一個滑板（來解決客戶當下的需求），然後在團隊與客戶之間建立一個反饋循環，以確保滑板（產品）適當地發展。

如果團隊，產品負責人 (Product Owner, PO) 與客戶（不論什麼原因導致）未能以迭代開發的方式建造最低可行產品 (MVP)，他們冒著最終可能會丟棄太多滑板的風險。如果我們不能將現有的滑板進一步發展成產品的下一個增量 (Increment)；從頭開始製造滑板車或是腳踏車是非常昂貴的。

備註：我們以上不是在談論「Set-Based Design」或是類似以正面與鼓勵「捨棄」的方法。