Even if you’re a Sith Lord in charge of the Empire, you can’t get everything built at once.

Building products under constraint is the key to product development and there are always constraints. If you’re the supreme overlord of the galaxy, it’s time until the Rebels find out what you’re up to, but in most business situations, you have both time and money (resource) constraints to contend with.

If you’re going to maximise value delivered, you need to prioritise your features and make sure you tick off the main value-add items right up front.

In lean and agile development, MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is often used for this, the idea is to ship the smallest thing we can deliver which will provide value, either direct market value or value by testing our assumptions.

The MVP approach understands that we don’t need everything now, we prioritise the 20% of features which add 80% of the value for our users, and ship workable increments, building a better and better solution on top of something that already fundamentally does the job. We take this approach instead of launching big bang with an all singing all dancing product, which has had no prior market testing.

In the sixth Star Wars film, the Rebel Alliance find that The Empire are at it again and building another Death Star. Having lost their first one to a well placed torpedo in the fourth film.

With the fate of the Universe at stake, the Rebel Alliance set out to destroy what they think is the half completed installation.

They are right, at least in part, they find a Death Star with lots of pieces missing and still clearly under construction, but what they actually find is a Death Star MVP.

Lord Sidious isn’t great at retrospectives but he’s nailed back log grooming.

What Darth Sidious has got right, is that he understands the key problems that he’s trying to solve and how his tool adds value.

He’s prioritised those features and shipped working increments so that he can get his tool into the market as fast as possible.

Even though it’s not the full and finished article, because he’s taken this approach, it is delivering value even in it’s unfinished state.

He knows that to add value and help him become tyrannical overlord of the Galaxy, the Death Star has to strike fear into the hearts of people all over the galaxy, but that security needs to be a priority as the costs of failure are high.

These are the features that matter not having a nice looking orb of a space station.

First up, Shields.

The Death Star 2 is still very much under development, but basic security concerns have been addressed. The shields are finished well before they’re needed as with all good security measures.

Secondly, the main cannon.

This is where the Death Star really shines when it comes to the MVP approach.

Lord Sidous has identified the feature that adds 80% of the value with 20% of the work, and that’s the first thing to get right, not making it pretty.

That’s why the station’s cannon is fully operational when the Rebels arrive, meeting the essential needs of the user (Darth Sidious) first.

The key take away is identifying what parts of your product really add value to the target market and making sure those get done first. That’s how you deliver value straight out of the gate.

Make sure your ‘cannon’ is working once your customers arrive.

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