My team at Westfield.com are always trying to educate the business sponsors to implement the simplest possible thing – to release the minimum viable product and generate validated learnings rather than implement gold-plated visions of what marketing folk think that people want.

Francis Is shows how successful Heroku were at doing this in Heroku’s Early History.

Heroku’s first offering bore little resemblance to what they finally became but it allowed them to pivot and adapt: to drop the offerings that no one cared about (online code editors, no deployments) and concentrate on the stuff they did (github integration, scalability). Early releases discovered what users really wanted and mining that seam of ‘want’ resulted in exponential growth and a $212 million cash buy-out within 3 years.