🧠 DESIGN THINKING
Minimum Lovable Products
Designing for longer-term consequence, not just immediate viability
🔍 Why it matters
"Fake it ‘til you make it" and "Growth at all costs" have resulted in speed to market and MVPs that are often barely usable, unhelpful, and unbuyable. Effective MVPs often utilise instant gratification hacks to lure users, before hitting them with monetisation.
At Humans In The Machine, we reframe MVPs into Minimum Lovable Products, which mean offering a balance of emotional resonance, usability, and strategic coherence.
MLPs harmonize sameness and difference, realism and divergence, to create helpful products people actually want to live with.
“In a world obsessed with standing out, perhaps the most radical act is to stand together.”
👥 Who is this for?
1️⃣ Founders scaling post-MVP or seeking seed funding
2️⃣ Product Owners and Marketers tired of feature bloat
3️⃣ Design Leads building with consequence
4️⃣ Investors seeking growth with purpose
🔮 What we explore
1. Customer-centric value a delight
Shared cultural architecture
Treating empathy with responsibility
Coherence as a design principle
Resilience through the challenger mindset
The power of venture concepting to generate living business ideas
2. Designing for Consequence Thinking
The impact of needy technology not needed technology
Lean and focused design
Visibility over invisibility
Designing for impact, not frictionlessness
3. Escaping the [In]attention Economy
Loyalty through clarity and resonance
Connection over conversion
Designing for depth, not distraction
Plan for future growth, incorporate modularity and composability.
🛠️
Engagement format examples
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“Designing the Minimum Lovable”
A hands-on session for founders, product teams, and strategists to reframe MVPs into emotionally resonant offerings.
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“MLP Studio”
A multi-session sprint for scale-ups and product-led teams. Combines strategic coaching, design rituals, and stakeholder alignment to build MLPs from the ground up.
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“Beyond MVP: Building for Consequence”
A contrarian view of startup design culture’s obsession with validation and invisibility, and introduces MLPs as a strategic alternative.
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“Product Lovability Index”
A rapid assessment and re-prototyping tool for evaluating product resonance across emotional, functional, and strategic dimensions.
💭 Final thought
MLPs reject the disposable and embrace consequence. Humans In The Machine helps teams build products that don’t just work, they matter. To power a new wave of products, services, skills and innovations, the future is about helping people to become future-fit, not left-behind and laid-off. Through cultures of enthusiasm we offer an alternative to specialization and resignation.