AI Killed the MVP – Long Live the IUP
Sep 27, 2026 · 13 min · 7 segments
This is the second of four posts on how AI has impacted our Lean LaunchPad class and what we did about it.
Sep 27, 2026 · 13 min · 7 segments
This is the second of four posts on how AI has impacted our Lean LaunchPad class and what we did about it.
Leaving the after-action review of our class this spring, we thought we understood the problem AI had created.
The minimum viable product, MVP, was no longer a useful artifact for customer discovery and arriving at an evidence-based value proposition.
To make clear what we thought of these AI-generated day one products, we labeled them Initial Untested Products, IUPs.
We were confident that we could make some simple fixes to the syllabus to deal with this.
To my chagrin, we would find that much like our students, we had confused the symptoms, the MVP is dead, with the much larger real problems facing the class.
After lots of iterations, we discovered the root causes and how to keep the class fresh for the AI age.
It felt like something much deeper was broken that I couldn't yet articulate or put my finger on.
After a while, I realized you can't know your future if you don't understand your past.
Who did I design the class for? How did I design the class? Why has it scaled and lasted almost two decades? What did we want students to learn 15 years ago? What do I want them to learn today? it was time to rethink the pedagogy of the class, the why and how of what we were teaching.
The result would be the context of the class in an updated curriculum and the syllabus for the students that describes all of it.
Only then could I make the changes to match the world as it is, not the world as it was.
Leaving the after-action review of our class this spring, we thought we understood the problem AI had created.
The minimum viable product, MVP, was no longer a useful artifact for customer discovery and arriving at an evidence-based value proposition.
To make clear what we thought of these AI-generated day one products, we labeled them Initial Untested Products, IUPs.
We were confident that we could make some simple fixes to the syllabus to deal with this.
To my chagrin, we would find that much like our students, we had confused the symptoms, the MVP is dead, with the much larger real problems facing the class.
After lots of iterations, we discovered the root causes and how to keep the class fresh for the AI age.
It felt like something much deeper was broken that I couldn't yet articulate or put my finger on.
After a while, I realized you can't know your future if you don't understand your past.
Who did I design the class for? How did I design the class? Why has it scaled and lasted almost two decades? What did we want students to learn 15 years ago? What do I want them to learn today? it was time to rethink the pedagogy of the class, the why and how of what we were teaching.
The result would be the context of the class in an updated curriculum and the syllabus for the students that describes all of it.
Only then could I make the changes to match the world as it is, not the world as it was.
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