Learning from failure: spikes, POCs, prototypes and MVPs

What each one is for, what learning it gives you, and how they help teams learn from failure

In my last post, I shared a Scale of Failure to help us work with failure more deliberately. The aim was to classify the main types we’re likely to see in engineering teams, and learn from them rather than just react to them.

Toward the bottom of the scale, there are informative failures, things you do deliberately to cause failures, so we can learn. That got me thinking about the approaches we use in engineering teams to create those learning loops on purpose, and what each one is actually for.

The four main types most teams lean on are Spikes, Proofs of Concept (POC), Prototypes, and Minimum Viable Products (MVPs).

But in my experience, teams often use these terms interchangeably, and that can cause real problems. For example, stakeholders might be expecting an MVP that we can test with early adopters, but what the team are actually doing is a spike to understand the technology.

So what do these terms mean, and how do they help us work with failure and uncertainty?

A quick way to think a…