Polygonal Product Management™

Everyone knows to ship small and iterate. Hopefully you’re getting to an MVP as quickly as possible so you can learn as quickly as possible. And hopefully you’re not stopping there; going beyond an MVP to ultimately develop a great feature.

Iterate through MVP to greatness

But do you keep going on a single feature until it’s awesome before moving on to another feature? If so, you’re doing depth over breadth. This is great, and nothing to be ashamed of. But there are other options. You can also do breadth over depth and ship a bunch of MVPs, never really improving any single feature until you’re “done”. Maybe then you go back and improve a bunch of the features, and slowly raise the quality of the entire produce until it’s great. Again, this is a valid approach.

Depth over Breadth vs Breadth over Depth

But let me introduce another approach. The depth triangle.

Depth triangle

Here, you constantly develop new features and get them to the coveted MVP state, then pick up a new feature, ship an MVP. But after a while, go back and improve one of your older features. There can be several months lag before you truly polish a feature, but you do eventually get there, all while continually increasing breadth.