Evidence Theatre
Steve Blank, reflecting on the latest run of his Lean LaunchPad class at Stanford:
In the past, an MVP was painfully developed, reflecting the week-to-week cumulative knowledge gathered by talking to stakeholders. An MVP also was evidence of a team's technical competence.It struck us that having a product on day one meant an MVP was no longer evidence of anything: not customer discovery, critical thinking, hypothesis testing, product/market fit, customer validation or even commitment.
Creating products rapidly at almost no cost had allowed teams to make bad ideas go faster.
AI had created evidence theater. These Initial Untested Products felt like evidence but had been built with minimal or no contact with customers. They looked like progress but dramatically raised confirmation bias and delayed pivots.
It wasn't that AI was hallucinating – the teams were.
The MVP was never really the product.
It was the receipt. Proof you'd got out of the building.
Now the receipt prints itself.
Making is a solved problem. In Blank's class, product development and customer development used to run in a short feedback loop. Now the product can look finished before the discovery has started.
Remove the friction and you can outrun the feedback.
Tony Fadell's prototypes were real enough to prove him wrong. The Stanford teams' were polished enough to make them feel right.
The MVP still has a job. Give it something to disprove.