The Atomic Unit

Perhaps referring to a cousin of the routine rite, Fred Wilson urges founders to think of the concept of an atomic unit — the most fundamental unit of the service, such as a tweet (Twitter), post (Tumblr), sound (SoundCloud), relationship (Facebook), check-in (FourSquare) or story (Wattpad) — when designing their minimum viable product.  He advises:

When you think about an MVP, it’s really important to identify the atomic unit and make sure you focus the product crisply and cleanly on that object. If you think you have three or four atomic units, you are going to end up with a clunky and bloated experience and that is what you want to avoid at all costs with your MVP (particularly if you are mobile first).

In a comment to the post, Hunter Walk, long–time product manager for YouTube, notes:

At various points in YouTube’s development we also used this to help us understand how site features support the atomic unit of video. One mantra was “every feature needs to start or end with a video being played” – everything else would be superfluous

The atomic unit for many of the ideas on this blog would, I think, be the “talent-matter match.”