Minimum Viable Product

I had a supervisor once who introduced me to the concept of minimum viable product. Our team had been working on a new project and it was taking longer to develop than expected. After meeting with the team he said something along the lines of "These are all great ideas you have for features for this project, but how many of them do you absolutely need". There is a tendancy among engineers to try to make what you are working on the best it can be. This impetus can be a very good thing when it's directed toward increasing the quality of a product. But it's a problem when it leads to wanting to produce the "perfect" application with all the features anyone could want and using the latest technology. Which can seem great until you realize that it might take twice as long to develop as a "good enough" application.