How much is too much and how much is too little while building a product is something people don't define too well.

But I'm of the opinion that without customer delight, be it the MVP or full fledged product, there won't be much retention.

Here's why this is such a contradictory thing for me, as I grew in the startup ecosystem all I learnt about was build a minimum viable product. Not a product that delivers delight/value to the customer but a product that can help you get a response on whether the value prop you're offering will appeal to the customers.

Just to be very clear here, the MVP definition has always been loose and almost everyone I meet has their own interpretation of it.

But as I extrapolate it to the real world, some of the most succesful products have come after years of R&D. The most succesful to date being an iphone, a definite edge case, but the product wasn't shabby when it launched.

It was a full fledged phone and did more than any of its peers when it launched. It wasn't something people stitched together in 3-6 months, but it was years of iteration before it even saw the light of day.

There's so many other products that fit into the same box - the DJI FPV drone (being my recent favourite) but even when we go to softwares, v1 products may not have been the best but they were better than anything else out there. Almost every single one focused on customer delight.

Obviously the argument here is that software and hardware products have different product development lifecycles which I tend to agree with, but I still do think that building barebones products in a world where everyone around you is building delightful products sounds a bit substandard as a philosophy to me and is something I will have to unlearn over time.

Moral : Strive for customer delight more than anything else.

Though I've realised what I've said is just as vague as MVP, so I should refine this philosophy a bit as I work on my product.