Minimum Lovable Products

Remember your favorite childhood toy? Mine was Tinker Toys. Not because of what they were – just wooden sticks and spools, but because of what they unlocked. A world of imagination I couldn’t access anywhere else. That feeling is what made them special. I think that’s true of most products we love. It’s never really about the product. It’s about how the product made us feel.

And if you want to build something people are fanatical about, the kind of product that makes them stand in line, you have to engineer that emotional connection deliberately. That’s what Minimum Lovable Products are designed to do.

Most of us were trained on Minimum Viable Product, the concept Eric Ries and Steve Blank popularized through the Lean Startup methodology. The core idea: build just enough to validate that people will use it. It’s a smart discipline, and it’s still necessary.

But viable and lovable are not the same thing. Think about it this way: you can enter a relationship with someone simply because they’re available. They’re fine. They meet the basic criteria. That’s a viable relationship. But it’s not one either of you will fight for.

Products work the same way. MVP asks “will they use it?” MLP asks “will they love it?” One optimizes for adoption. The other builds for devotion. And if you want people standing in line, recommending you without being asked, coming back even when a cheaper option exists, you need to be building toward love, not just viability.

The Importance of Emotional Resonance

The phrase “falling in love with a product” sounds like marketing speak. But every one of us has experienced it. There are products that transcend their utility and become part of who we are. That’s not an accident. That’s emotional resonance doing its job.

Peloton is just an exercise bike. Objectively. But through careful attention to community, content, and brand, they’ve built something people are genuinely devoted to. The hardware didn’t do that. The feeling did.

Two shifts have made this more urgent than ever.

First, your real competition isn’t your competitor. It’s every great experience your user has ever had. A banking app isn’t competing with other banking apps for emotional engagement. It’s competing with Spotify, with TikTok, with the best onboarding flow they’ve ever seen. The bar for good is set by the best thing they’ve touched, regardless of category.

Second, premium is no longer a differentiator. Apple and Disney have done something more disruptive than raising the bar for polish. They’ve changed what users consider acceptable. Luxury used to mean access to something rare. Now beautiful, thoughtful experiences are everywhere and often cheap. Premium isn’t about looking expensive anymore. It’s about feeling intentional at every turn.

Both of these shifts point to the same thing: you can’t just design the user experience, meaning the interface, the workflow, the features. You have to shape the user’s experience, meaning their emotional journey through it.

Context Matters: The Consumer’s Full Experience

Before we get to the principles, there’s something worth establishing. User experience isn’t a fixed thing. It’s a variable, and it has inputs.

The same product, on the same day, can land completely differently depending on where a person is emotionally, what they’ve experienced before, and what they were expecting walking in. A frustrated customer needs something different than a confident one. Someone burned by a bad interaction with your product last month is carrying that into every new touchpoint. Cultural context and personal history shape what people notice, what they trust, and what they forgive.

This is why the shift from designing the user experience to shaping the user’s experience matters. The first treats experience as a thing you build. The second treats it as something that happens inside a person, and that you can influence but never fully control.

Understanding that is what makes the following principles work. They aren’t steps in a process. They’re ways of accounting for the full, variable, deeply human thing you’re actually designing for.

The 7 Principles of Creating Minimum Lovable Products

There’s a quality of attention that separates products people tolerate from products people love. It shows up in small decisions, in what you choose to remove, in the questions you ask before you build anything. The following principles are a guide to practicing that kind of attention systematically.

1. Lead With Questions, Not Solutions

When Edwin Land’s three-year-old daughter asked why she couldn’t see a photo right after he took it, he didn’t explain the technology. He asked a better question: “Why not?” That question led to the Polaroid camera.

Our job isn’t to have good ideas and build solutions. It’s to understand the problem so deeply that the right solution becomes obvious. At P97, we stopped asking “How do we make mobile payments easier?” and started asking “What if paying for gas felt exactly like getting gas?” That shift in questioning led to an experience where the payment happened invisibly. The breakthrough wasn’t technical. It was philosophical.

The quality of your product starts with the quality of your questions. Most teams rush past this. They arrive at the first plausible question and start building. But the first question is rarely the right one. Keep asking until you find the one that makes the solution feel inevitable.

2. Design for Invisibility

The best tools are the ones you don’t notice. A great chef’s knife feels like an extension of their hand. A great writer’s pen disappears, leaving only the words.

A good design gets out of the way. Follow the principle of “remove until it breaks, then add back only what’s essential.” Stripe built an entire company around this idea. Their payment infrastructure is designed to be completely invisible to the people actually making purchases. When it’s working at its best, customers never think about payments at all. They just get what they came for. The better Stripe works, the less anyone notices it. That’s not a side effect of good design. That’s the goal.

When your product disappears, the user’s experience expands. That’s your mission. Pay close attention to every moment where your product draws attention to itself, because that’s usually where you’re asking users to do your work for you.

3. Design How It Works, Not How It Looks

When you watch a great film, you don’t notice the editing. The cuts are invisible, serving the story. The most important design decisions happen before anyone opens a design tool.

The real design work is understanding how something should work, what should happen when, why users would want it to happen, and how it fits into the larger story of what they’re trying to accomplish. At Hello Alice, we spent months designing our AI recommendation engine not by building interfaces, but by understanding the stories small business owners tell themselves about growth.

How something works is a decision about what you believe your user deserves. That requires more of your attention than it usually gets.

4. Obsess Over the Whole Experience

Disney doesn’t just build rides. They build worlds. The experience starts with the parking lot signs, continues with the music playing in the streets, and extends to the way cast members interact with you.

The user’s experience starts with the first ad they see and continues through the support ticket they file a year later. Every interaction leaves an impression. Every transition tells a story about how much you care. I once worked with a developer who spent three days perfecting the timing of a loading animation that appeared for less than two seconds. Some thought it was excessive. I thought it was essential. Users feel quality even when they can’t articulate it.

The moments most teams ignore are the moments users remember most. Pay attention to the edges of your product, the onboarding, the errors, the endings. That’s where care shows up or disappears.

5. Create What People Don’t Know They Need

Before the iPhone, nobody complained about not being able to access the internet while walking down the street. Before Spotify, nobody said, “I wish I could have every song ever recorded for $10 a month.”

Users are experts in their problems, not in the solutions. At Hello Alice, we didn’t ask small business owners what AI features they wanted. We observed where they wasted time, where they made decisions based on incomplete information, and where they felt most uncertain. The AI features that performed best weren’t the ones that felt like “AI features.” They were the ones that felt like the platform had suddenly become a trusted advisor.

This kind of insight doesn’t come from surveys. It comes from sustained attention to what people do, not just what they say.

6. Eliminate Everything That Widens the Gap Between Promise and Delivery

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he didn’t ask what products to build. He asked what products to kill. He cut the product line from 350 to 10.

Every product makes promises. The button that says “this will be easy.” The onboarding that says “we understand you.” The pricing page that says “we’re fair.” Trust is what happens when you keep those promises consistently. Complexity is what breaks them.

Every feature you add creates a new promise. A new surface where the gap between what you said and what you delivered can widen. At P97, we killed a feature that would have generated significant revenue because it didn’t align with our vision of invisible payments. Not because it was a bad idea in isolation, but because it would have introduced friction that contradicted everything else we were telling users about the experience.

That’s the real discipline of elimination. You’re not cutting features to manage technical debt or reduce cognitive load, though both matter. You’re cutting them because every unnecessary thing is a potential broken promise. Every time you remove something that isn’t earning its place, you’re closing the distance between what you promised and what you actually deliver.

That’s how trust accumulates. Quietly, consistently, one kept promise at a time.

7. Build to Learn, Learn to Build

A sculptor doesn’t just carve a statue. They discover it. They start with a block of stone and a rough idea, and then they chip away, responding to what the material tells them.

The goal isn’t to get it right the first time. It’s to get something real into people’s hands as quickly as possible so you can start learning. Some of the best products I’ve shipped were the third or fourth complete reimagining of the original idea. Treat every release as an experiment, not a final answer. The question isn’t “Is it done?” The question is “What did we learn?”

Products that people love aren’t finished. They’re tended. The attention doesn’t stop at launch. That’s where it becomes most important.

The Real Work

Here’s what most product teams miss. Emotional connection isn’t a layer you add at the end. It isn’t a feature, a color palette, or a tagline. It’s the result of a thousand small decisions made by people who were paying the right kind of attention.

The companies people genuinely love didn’t get there by accident. They got there because someone, somewhere, cared enough to ask better questions, remove what didn’t serve the user, and keep learning long after launch. That discipline compounds over time in ways that features never can.

Loyal users don’t stay because switching is hard. They stay because leaving feels like a loss. That’s what you’re building toward.

The 7 principles aren’t a checklist. They’re a practice. And like any practice, the results show up slowly and then all at once. The goal isn’t a product people use. It’s a product people miss when it’s gone.

That’s the difference between viable and lovable. And now you have a way to build toward it.