How a viral video helped me design my MVP

About a year ago, I came across that video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ

I chuckled along  -  it's funny 'cause it's true, particularly if you’ve ever worked within a complex technology ecosystem. If you’ve a as product manager or a technologist you've likely had that conversation.

As with most viral videos I promptly forgot about it.

Until a year later when I was building the MVP for the Slate. It stuck me, this is the type of problem I'm trying to help solve.

Highlighting and communicating dependancies between microservices, architectural decisions and product requirements is hard. So I took the video and tried to work out;

1. Does the Slate have all the functionality there that they describe?
2. What would this technology estate even look like if they used the Slate?

After some tweaking and a missed piece of functionality ("deprecation notices, how could I have forgotten those?!"), I had my result.

• Service definition for Entropy Khaos Service (EKS) which is being deprecated
• Service definition for Omega Star, the replacement for EKS
• The architectural decision that everything should support ISO timestamps
• And of course, Galatcus, the all-knowing user service provider aggregator.

Could the Slate have actually helped?

I know that it’s an exaggerated scenario, but it’s pretty close to the truth as well. It gave me a nice insight to additional challenges, a missing obviously feature and a “demo-able” example for people to see/interact with the slate.

Would the Product Manager have known about how the services interrelate, what the blocker for Birthday Boy is, and why? I’d say so.

Would the Slate have stopped an awkward conversation between a Product Manager and Developer that ended in crying? I’m not sure.

What alternative ways have you tried to validate your MVP?