Let the machine build the demo, make humans prove the learning
Steve Blank has retired the minimum viable product. Not because it was wrong, but because AI made it meaningless.
For fifteen years a working MVP did two jobs. It proved a team could build something, and it was evidence they had learned something from customers. A product can now be generated on day one with neither, so Blank's Lean LaunchPad class has relabelled these artefacts Initial Untested Products. The name is the point.
The same problem sits inside most corporate innovation programmes. Steering committees still treat a demo as a proxy for progress, and most gate criteria were written when building was the expensive part, so a working demo stood in for competence and commitment at once. When a prototype costs a weekend rather than a quarter, a demo proves only that someone has access to a coding model. The stage gate has not moved, but the cost of walking through it has collapsed.
I wrote about the business-case version of this over the weekend: customer interviews generated by AI are entering investment cases, and a claim of demand that cannot be traced to a real conversation should count for nothing. Blank is now saying the same thing from the classroom. The artefact was never the evidence. It just made the evidence easier to fake.
What remains scarce is the work itself: customer interviews, tested hypotheses, a clear record of what was tried and abandoned. That was always the real work. The artefact simply made it easier to pretend otherwise.
If your stage-gate process rewards what a team built rather than what it learned, it is now measuring the wrong thing, and doing so at scale. The fix is not to ban the tools. Blank's own class uses AI to the maximum and still demands the evidence behind it. That is the standard worth copying: let the machine build the demo, and make the humans prove the learning.
Source: Steve Blank, "AI Killed the MVP - Long Live the IUP" (25 Sep): https://lnkd.in/gCSD-6Hu
Related: my Saturday post on AI slop in business cases: https://lnkd.in/gdHUVYJ4
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