Some things you read provide value by giving you facts or ideas or examples that you didn’t know before. There is a very special – and all too rare – category of writing which provides value by making sense of things you knew already, which provides a clear and concise encapsulation of something which it is hard to explain easily. This post is firmly in that latter category, doing some hard work to make a useful concept simple.
The concept concerned is the ‘minimum political product’, which is quite like a minimum viable product except for being driven by a political need rather than a user need. They are a reality of life and it makes sense to understand them and to create them in a way which maximises the value they provide – and the fact that the genesis of the requirement, or some of the delivery characteristics it needs to demonstrate, is political doesn’t change that. That’s not to say that the first response to every minister wanting an MPP should be to build it. But it is a recognition that politics is both the art of making decisions and the context in which those decisions stand and fall, and that a solution which does not meet political needs may well not survive long enough to meet any needs at all.