WARNING this blog post contains adult themes including violence. I’m sure the title of this post does not match the first sentence, but hopefully you are intrigued to keep reading.

One of the cornerstones of innovation is around the principle of a minimum viable product. In simple terms, the characteristics are identifying a problem to be solved, then testing that hypothesis typically through some sort of market research, then building something quickly and economically to get into the market to validate the hypothesis to support a decision of a “go” or “no go” investment to further scale. Now, I am going to go back into my early childhood to show where I miserably failed at key components of the “MVP” principles.

As I have shared in previous posts, I lived in a home adjacent to my grandfathers farm so we never really had dogs as pets, but had cats. We had cats mainly because they are good for farms due to their ability to control the mouse population in the barn. To begin this story I want to preface that I think I was probably 6 or 7 years old which would have made my older sister 10 or 11 years old. We had been begging our parents for a pet for quite some time, so they finally conceded and allowed both my sister and I to each pick a kitten from a recent litter at my grandfathers house. We were so excited and promised our parents that we would take care of these kittens to make sure they had food and water.

Now as I go further into this story, I want to reinforce that I was 6 or 7 years old when these events took place, so please don’t think I have some type of foundational personality flaw or psychological disorder. My favorite cartoon growing up was Tom and Jerry, and on that show it was always portrayed that “cats always land on their feet”. I also heard this many times hanging around the farm as well, mainly because it was a way to reference their agility in navigating the many obstacles, small spaces and heights inside and around the barn. Well, I decided to “test” this hypothesis on my own with the kittens we had recently gotten. More importantly, I decided to conduct this test with my sister’s cat and not my cat! I am not going to get into too many details for fear of further indicting myself, but essentially my test included me holding the cat upside down while dropping it from our front porch down onto the ground below. Needless to say the young kitten did not fare very well in the experiment and unfortunately did not make it. As you can imagine, my older sister was extremely upset and even to this day (I won’t tell you how many years later), brings up this story at family events. Now I don’t want the takeaway from this story to be “OMG you killed your sister’s cat!” I want to narrow in on the takeaways I learned as a result, but starting with the notion there is an innate curiosity in all of us to solve problems and test solutions. That is the driving force behind innovation. Furthermore, as a business leader those customers that are the most outspoken and frustrated about the status quo, who are the ones to best focus on when looking to innovate both from gaining an understanding of the problem and testing your hypothesis for the solution.

Leadership takeaways:

1. Once you identify a problem, conduct market research to determine if it is truly a widespread market problem that needs to be solved. If I would have started with market research (mainly asking my parents) about cats landing on their feet, I could have avoided the ultimate outcome of my sister’s kitten.
2. One of the main principles of an MVP is utilizing minimal investment to establish a solution to further test the market problem. In my case, I did not follow that principle, it would have been a much better option to utilize one of my stuffed animals first for the MVP versus sacrificing my sister’s kitten.
3. Lastly, don’t accept failure of an MVP as a failure to solve the problem. Stay curious, stay open minded and stay flexible. The good part about my situation was I still had my kitten to further test it’s speed and agility, but I tested with four “paws” firmly on the ground!