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Kent Beck, the guy who created Extreme Programming, Test Driven Development, and the first Unit Test Library ever, made a very similar point about this a few years ago, in his "The Flight of the Startup"[1]

In the taxi phase, breadth, speed, and, above all, cost of experimentation is the key. Try out ideas related to lots of different needs. Precision of feedback during the taxi phase is less important than trying out lots of different kind of ideas. The risk during the taxi phase is that you won’t find a genuine need. Address this by reducing the cost of experiments and running many of them.

After working for a while for Facebook (the move fast and break things company) he described how deployment speed dramatically affects how you work on his "Software G Forces: The Effects of Acceleration"[2].

So, it is not a secret that discovering "something people want" is more important than working code[4], because failure if the great equalizer of code: all good code and all bad code is equally thrown away[5].

[1] http://www.threeriversinstitute.org/blog/?p=251

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIkUWG5ACFY which was seconded by Mary Poppendiek on her "How Cadence Predicts Process"[3]

[3] http://www.leanessays.com/2011/07/how-cadence-determines-pro...

[4] http://swik.net/Eclipse/Planet+Eclipse/Julius+Shaw:+Kent+Bec...

[5] http://www.universalsubtitles.org/en/videos/6FfAAXK00nWB/en/...

⬐ nwjsmith

A link to the slides:

http://www.slideshare.net/KentBeck/software-g-forces