6 teams remain, and the competition — and their products — are about to get real. They need to ship an MVP to impress the judges, or risk going home.

A minimum viable product (MVP) is how we get the product into real users’ hands and start to see how actual people respond to it. A plan rarely survives contact with reality, so keeping these lightweight and easy to modify is key. This is when everything gets real: real feedback from real users on real, working software.

Nailing the “minimum” part is hard. Go too far and you risk overcommitting to a direction that doesn’t hit, but if you don’t go far enough, your users will be underwhelmed.

Host and judges

Host: Kelsey Hightower, distinguished engineer https://www.linkedin.com/in/kelsey-hightower-849b342b1/ Judge: Jason Lengstorf, creator of CodeTV https://www.linkedin.com/in/jlengstorf/ Ashely Willis, Sr. Director of Developer Relations at GitHub https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashleymcnamara1/

About this series

Great devs build great projects. But building a great product is about more than the frontend and backend. Kelsey Hightower hosts a competition to find out what it takes to really be a builder.

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