Renew as a Microsoft MVP

Today, while processing my email on this beautiful Canada Day, I was happy to find my MVP renewal among the many messages in my inbox.

For sixteen consecutive years, I am the proud recipient of the Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award from Microsoft. MVP status is awarded to credible technology experts who have demonstrated their deep commitment to helping others make the most of their technology, voluntarily sharing their passion and real-world knowledge of Microsoft products with the community. As usual, I am receiving this award mainly for my outstanding contribution as host of the Visual Studio Talk Show podcast. This French-language podcast, where we discuss software architecture, began in November 2004 (Yes! 16 years ago). With the help of co-host Guy Barrette, we publish a show with a French-spoken technology expert on a monthly basis.

Here is a listing of the podcasts we published lately:

Monday, June 8, 2020	0244 – Karol Deland – Team Topologies
Tuesday, May 5, 2020	0243 – Serge Tremblay – Microsoft Teams et la pandémie
Sunday, April 19, 2020	0242 – Luc Labelle – La plateforme Power Apps
Tuesday, March 3, 2020	0241 – Etienne Tremblay – GitHub Actions
Thursday, February 13, 2020	0240 – Anthony Giretti – Le protocole gRPC
Thursday, January 9, 2020	0239 – Chantal Bossé – Mieux présenter
Wednesday, December 4, 2019	0238 – Guy Barrette – Kubernetes
Monday, November 4, 2019	0237 – Spécial Certification
Tuesday, October 15, 2019	0236 – Nicolas Georgeault – Microsoft Teams
Saturday, September 14, 2019	0235 – Michel Perfetti – Azure DevOps
Friday, August 2, 2019	0234 – Jerome Laban – La plateforme UNO

Minimum Lovable and Marketable Product

In this post, I explain why the first version of DayTickler must not only be lovable but also a marketable product.

Following my last post some readers were surprised that we will take almost nine months to produce a minimum viable product (MVP). According to Wikipedia, a minimum viable product (MVP) is the product with the highest return on investment versus risk. Usually, a MVP only has those basic features that allow the product to be deployed, and no more. The product is typically deployed to a subset of customers (early adopters) that are supposed to be more forgiving, more likely to give feedback, and able to confirm a product vision from an early prototype. As stated by Eric Ries in his colloquial book The Lean Startup, “The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.“

At this stage in our product development, we seek to validate whether customers will agree to subscribe to the premium version of DayTickler. As we aim to market to consumer in an already mature market (there are already over a hundred to-do app), we can hardly launch a product that would be perceived as incomplete. We need to polish the software to the point of making it lovable, and this requires time. Furthermore, it must have all the necessary features to make it marketable. In our case, this requires building not only the core of the product but also the main feature that will convince customers to subscribe and pay for the premium version. This means that the product cannot be a prototype and this takes work. Especially that while building the product, at the same time, we continue to do consulting. Here’s why the construction of the MVP is so demanding and requires more than 9 months.

Minimum Lovable Product

In this post, I am providing a progress status on the development of DayTickler.

For more than seven months, with my business partner Erik Renaud, we are currently building the first version of DayTickler, a mobile app to plan your “Today Schedule”. It’s going well. By the end of August, we will have a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) ready for launch in the app store. The process may seem long but we must ensure that our first version will be a minimum lovable product.

As noted on twitter by Jussi Pasanen, building a MVP is much more complex than programming a few scattered features. This is a wise mix of a functional, reliable, usable and emotional design.