A long Reddit review of the Litter Robot 5 Pro has a terse executive summary:
They basically shipped an MVP and are in sprint 2.
MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product, intended to test the basic concept of the product against the needs and desires of users to validate the direction your development is heading in1. When used correctly, an Agile MVP is the incremental step to ensure a software solution actually solves actual users’ problems; if not, reevaluate and adjust. Regardless, the functionality included in an MVP should be complete and technically strong; unfortunately, that is often not the case.
However, using Agile to design a hardware solution is non-sensible: iterations of hardware changes are much more expensive than reimplementing software solutions. Sure, changes for efficiency or problematic components are often required, but should be the exception not the rule. In Agile MVP, on-going changes are expected and not the exception.
The real scenario may be that the hardware was ready, the software was not, but leadership needed revenue and the completed hardware and incomplete software was shipped, regardless of the impact on customers. Hopefully the firmware is is easily updated as new versions are made available; in the meantime, customers are left holding the (kitty litter) bag. Yucky!
