Scope and the MVP

The first fight about the cheer feature happens on a whiteboard. It is about size.

Emoji reactions, voice notes, cheer leaderboards, and a heat map of where your cheers found their runner. Then scheduled cheers for the splits you know you will miss, and every other lovely, expensive thing a roomful of people who care can dream onto a whiteboard in under forty minutes, with everyone in the room wanting a different one. Dana draws a box. Almost none of it is inside. The box is scopeConcept · lights on your mapscopeThe agreed boundaries of the work: what is included, and just as loudly, what is not. Scope creep is the boundary quietly expanding mid-build, and “out of scope” is a complete sentence., and what Dana says while drawing it is the sentence this scene exists for: deciding what we are not doing is the decision.

The walls the box sits inside

Some lines are not Dana’s to draw, and the meeting simply inherits them, the way runners inherit the weather, with the same rights of appeal. The feature must ship before race day, must never touch the timing pipeline, has to work on phones three years old, and must cost nearly nothing at rest. Four walls. Each of those is a constraintConcept · lights on your mapconstraintA fixed condition the work must respect: a date, a budget, an old device, a regulation. Constraints differ from requirements; they are the walls the solution has to fit inside.: not what the feature is, but the walls it must fit inside.

And inside the box, Dana writes the checklist that will define done. A follower can send one text message of 140 characters to one runner. The runner sees it between mile markers, and a message sent after the finish is quietly dropped. That list is the acceptance criteriaConcept · lights on your mapacceptance criteriaThe testable checklist that defines done for a ticket, agreed before building starts. If it is not in the criteria, do not expect it in the demo. The testers will read this exact list later., and it is agreed before a line of code exists. Weeks from now, a tester will hold the feature against this exact list, which is why it is written as things a person can check.

Small on purpose

What is left in the box is text only, one runner, one race. That is the MVPConcept · lights on your mapMVPMinimum viable product: the smallest version that delivers real value and real learning, shipped first so reality can vote before the bigger version is funded. Deliberately small and complete, as opposed to shoddy and large., and the word doing the work is viable. A shoddy version of the big idea would miss the point entirely. This is a deliberately small, complete thing, shipped first so that reality gets a vote before anybody funds the emoji.

Maple Grove, week ten, four thousand runners: that is where reality votes. The whiteboard photo goes in the ticket. The ticket goes to Finn.