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A comment on 20 months, 2K hours, 200K € lost. A story about resilience and sunk cost fallacy. Parent comment

Re:20 months, 2K hours, 200K € lost. A story about resilienc... by loosetypes on Monday January 04, 2021 @12:44AM (#25628234)
Would you consider something like @username mentions as excessive in scope for what would have been Slack's MVP?

(I know bits of their "origin story" but am in no way familiar with their early product or whether that feature was around from the beginning)

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Re:20 months, 2K hours, 200K € lost. A story about resilienc... by toast0 on Monday January 04, 2021 @02:13AM (#25628550)
Mentions are definitely out of scope for a MVP. It's not really needed until you have a fairly sizable room.
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Re:20 months, 2K hours, 200K € lost. A story about resilienc... by corytheboyd on Monday January 04, 2021 @07:55AM (#25630674)
Very interesting question, I have my own take on an answer.

I would say yes, @mentions make a chat product like slack minimally viable. It is a baseline expectation of a modern chat solution to be able to ping others by name.

However, the minimally viable form of the @mention feature is where you stop. Skip all things that are not “the @mentioned user received a notification when I send the message”

If you disagree with me, please explain why. I don’t at all believe that a Slack MVP that is nothing more than a WebRTC chat demo would be a sellable MVP in 2020. MVP and prototyping seems to be very conflated.

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