I once worked on a gaming website.

It collected structured metadata about games - tags for features, screenshots, videos, reviews. Users contributed information. We gamified participation and rewarded it with games and gifts.

It started making money through “similar games” lists.

All of our traffic came from Google.

Then we needed more revenue.

So we did what teams do.

We added features.
Integrated Steam, Xbox and PSN.
Pulled in achievements.
Expanded recommendation lists.
Tweaked advertising.
Worked on SEO.

Traffic crept upward.

Still not enough.

Eventually we decided the problem was perception.

The site looked too much like a community project. It needed to feel more premium. More authoritative. More modern.

So we renamed it.
Changed the domain.
Redesigned it from the ground up.

Months of work.

We launched.

Traffic collapsed.

We never recovered.

In hindsight, the failure wasn’t technical.

It wasn’t branding.

It wasn’t SEO.

It was that we never made a hard decision about what the product actually was.

Was it:

• A participatory community?
• A structured data engine?
• A search destination?
• A content property optimised for Google?
• A recommendations platform?

It was all of them.

Weakly.

What Google valued wasn’t polish. It valued volatility.

Our homepage changed many times a day because users were contributing.
Those contributions created fresh internal links, fresh content, fresh signals.

Participation was the engine.

When we redesigned for the information consumer instead of the contributor, we stabilised the surface.

We accidentally killed the engine.

We optimised the visible layer and ignored the system feeding it.

I first heard the phrase “we’ll fix it in post” from my filmmaker brother.

Something wasn’t quite right during filming, but they moved on anyway. It could be corrected later.

In film, that’s sometimes true.

In product development, it’s usually self-deception.

Lean encourages delaying decisions to the last responsible moment.
That’s discipline.

What most teams practice is delaying decisions until they become painful.
That’s avoidance.

An MVP is not the smallest thing you can push out.
It is the smallest thing that is coherent and viable.

Viable means it has a clear shape.
It respects constraints.
It closes more questions than it opens.

If you ship something that only works on the happy path, with undefined edges and postponed trade-offs, you haven’t preserved optionality.

You’ve preserved ambiguity.

Ambiguity spreads.

In code, as defensive layers.
In design, as half-committed patterns.
In product, as multiple possible futures carried at once.

Teams don’t slow down because they’re weak.
They slow down because no one chose.

Every postponed constraint becomes cognitive load.
Every “temporary” rule becomes precedent.

Lean does not say “don’t decide.”

It says: decide at the point where delaying further increases cost.

Most teams drift past that point because deciding feels like loss.

Loss of flexibility.
Loss of imagined futures.
Loss of political safety.

But momentum comes from commitment.

Once something is decided, energy frees up.
The system becomes legible.
Subsequent decisions compound instead of conflict.

We didn’t fail because we built the wrong feature.

We failed because we never chose what we were.

Most startups don’t die from lack of effort.

They die from unmade decisions.

“We’ll fix it later” is not iteration.

It is hope disguised as strategy.