Complex Products
Dec 10, 2024
One of the most important insights in product development is understanding the right way to start and defining what a true minimum viable product should look like. At first glance, the idea seems simple: strip your product down to the bare essentials, test it with real users, gather feedback, and quickly iterate based on what people actually need and are willing to pay for. The logic behind this approach is solid. The best startups are not just idea factories; they are learning machines. They move rapidly through bad ideas, discard what does not work, and converge on solutions that align with genuine customer demand. By cutting out assumptions and focusing on evidence, you improve your odds of building something people truly want.
Yet, this is only part of the story. The traditional minimum viable product concept works well for many types of products, especially those that can be reduced to a simple feature or a small workflow improvement. In these cases, you can easily validate your assumptions by putting something tangible in front of customers and seeing if they will pay. You do not rely on their polite feedback; you rely on whether they open their wallets. If they do, it is a good signal that you are onto something. If they don’t, it is time to iterate, pivot, or abandon the idea. This reduces wasted effort and focuses you on building solutions rather than indulging in guesswork.
However, the world of product development is more varied than a single approach can handle. Some products are based on a pure technological innovation—say, a breakthrough in materials science or a new way of processing data at unprecedented speed. If that technology is genuinely superior along dimensions that matter, it may not need immediate user validation. Better, faster, and cheaper solutions to known problems can often find their place without extensive interviews because the improvement is self-evident. In these cases, your main job is to perfect the technology itself.
Other products can be so simple that their entire value proposition can be delivered in a minimal end-to-end form. This is crucial because customers rarely want raw data or half-finished concepts. They want an integrated solution that solves a problem from start to finish. A small, well-crafted version of the final vision is often enough to test the waters. For instance, imagine a tool that replaces a tedious part of a workflow with a smooth, automated process. On paper, this sounds great, but if using the tool creates more overhead, requires complex integration, or forces constant context switching, the supposed improvement might actually make the user’s life worse. You have to ensure that even a minimal solution still provides a coherent, end-to-end experience that customers can adopt seamlessly. If your MVP does not solve a big enough problem or is too cumbersome to use, you might lose credibility before you’ve even started.
Then there are products that do not fit neatly into these categories because they require a whole new universe of complexity. Think of building an airplane. You cannot just begin by giving customers a bicycle and then gradually evolve it into a plane. An airplane demands a fully integrated system that includes aerodynamic structures, engines, avionics, materials engineering, and passenger safety. Each part depends on the others, and none of it works until you have the entire configuration in place. This principle applies to many modern products, whether it is the original iPhone that redefined what a phone could be, Tesla’s electric cars that required building charging networks and battery technologies, or advanced software ecosystems that unify numerous applications and agents under a single operating system of work.
My own startup, Momentum, falls into this “complex coordination” category. The ultimate vision is to create an operating system of work where everyone and every tool remain aligned toward a set of evolving goals. When something changes—a new priority emerges, a resource constraint appears—the system should automatically re-optimize plans and guide you through the adjustments. To deliver this end state, Momentum needs deep integration with countless services, intelligent agent systems, data harmonization layers, and a causal reasoning engine. It is not the kind of product where you can just build a trivial MVP and hope for straightforward user validation. The core value only emerges when all parts come together, when the system truly orchestrates an entire workflow and not just a single piece of it.
In such cases, being your own user is often the only reliable way forward. You must have concrete, personal demand for the product as it is being built. You must rely on your taste, technical understanding, and first-principle reasoning to ensure that all components align. It is undeniably risky, but the payoff is that the result can be extremely hard to copy. Competitors cannot simply replicate your MVP because your value lies in the integrated complexity that you spent years refining.
Still, complexity does not mean you cannot adopt some strategies from more straightforward products. Many pioneering companies have found clever ways to bridge the gap. SpaceX did not start by sending humans to Mars. They began by launching simpler missions—first to prove their rockets worked at all, then to deliver cargo reliably, then to recover rocket stages, and eventually to carry astronauts. Each smaller step was a hook that demonstrated technological capability and built trust. Tesla did something similar: before mass-market electric cars, they introduced the Roadster to show that electric vehicles could be both exciting and viable, and along the way they sold battery technology and energy storage solutions, planting their vision in the market’s consciousness. The smartphone startup Nothing first released earbuds. Earbuds are simpler and more accessible, letting users experience the brand’s style and approach while the company worked on its main event, the phone. Over time, these smaller products served as anchors, proving certain parts of the technology and earning brand recognition, long before the full ecosystem was rolled out.
The lesson is that when you are building a complex, integrated product, you should keep two complementary strategies in mind. First, you must build the product you believe in, the one that fully realizes your vision end to end. This means maintaining a clear focus on the complete user experience and ensuring every detail works perfectly. You talk with people about their challenges, you understand the fundamental problems, and you refine the product continuously as your own user. Second, you can develop smaller, self-contained offerings that leverage subsets of your technology. These mini-products, while more modest in scope, still solve a concrete user problem. They create valuable hooks that introduce customers to your broader ecosystem, help them see the power of what you can do, and allow you to gather insights about how real users interact with and value your innovations.
At Momentum, we can, for example, build a small tool that uses the same underlying agents and modeling capabilities to generate pitch decks for founders based on their company model and goals. Although this is just one small application, it clearly demonstrates the potential of our approach. Users get value right away, we learn from how they interact with this simpler solution, and we strengthen the building blocks of our ultimate product. Over time, as these users trust our capabilities and see how well we understand their challenges, we can guide them toward the full operating system of work that Momentum aims to offer.
In the end, there is no single formula for building a product and validating your assumptions. Simple products lend themselves to rapid MVP testing and direct sales calls that verify genuine demand. Technological breakthroughs might not need immediate user validation if their superiority is obvious. Complex coordination products require a long view, where the product only becomes meaningful when its intricate parts are fully integrated. Yet even in that complex domain, you can find stepping stones that anchor your technology in the market. By combining an uncompromising focus on the full vision with strategic, smaller products that hook users early, you set yourself on a path where complexity becomes an asset rather than a deterrent. This approach ensures that when your grand solution finally arrives, an audience already exists that understands its value, trusts its brand, and is ready to embrace its full potential.