Two things. What we ship. And good teams.

I think I first heard this analogy in 2006 at a conference in Berlin and it was in relation to describing an MVP. If a product is a layer cake, they might look something like this:

Icing (frosting): ‘Delight’ for want of a better word
Fourth layer: Interface
Third layer: Features
Second layer: Capabilities
First layer: Technical architecture

Often, when push comes to shove, teams will be encouraged to ship a layer of the cake to the customer instead of a slice. Or they might ship a couple of layers and miss others. The really good MVPs that I’ve seen go out of the door are those where the teams did the really, really hard work in trade offs to ship a good slice. Yes, limited in what they originally planned, but not compromising on the whole slice. The whole experience. The whole taste.

And the second thing about cakes is teams.

Good cakes are the result of good recipes and good chemistry. Just like teams. It takes time and effort to build teams based on chemistry. It takes patience, sometimes hard decisions, but when you get it right, that’s when the magic happens.

Good teams have good chemistry. Like cakes.