First off let me apologise for the laboured metaphor I'm about to inflict on you, but I thought it could be entertaining to try and describe the web design industry using a medium I'm sure you're all familiar with; Dungeons & Dragons.
I first came across the term Minimum Viable Product when I dropped into a talk by Eric Reis at the Web 2.0 Expo in New Year a few year's back. As a company that has always worked on variable scope projects, defining a MVP seemed like a great way of managing client expectations.
Have you every been in the situation where the client keeps requesting tweaks to the design or changes in functionality? As you sit moving boxes around the page, the budget is slowly draining away and you're no longer sure whether the project can be completed on target? In these situations what do you do?
I first came across the concept of the Lean Start-up three years ago while speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit in New York. I'd finished my duties and there was little else of interest on the schedule so I dropped into a panel discussion about start-ups.
Over the last few years I've noticed a strange and disturbing trend amongst web practitioners. There was a time—not so long ago—when passionate individuals would blog about their work for no other reason than to share their discoveries. The more prolific of these individuals built up an online reputation and became seen as experts. Some of the more articulate ones were asked to write books or present their thoughts at conferences, and received a modicum of success.
There's a lot of nonsense being written about conferences at the moment; so as a regular speaker, organiser and attendee of both free and paid for events, I thought I'd redress the balance.