I wrote this one early in my time at Feedzai, when our design team was still small enough to fit around one table. It holds up better than most things I wrote at twenty-eight, so I'm reprinting the argument here rather than letting it sit alone on an old Medium account.
The premise was simple. User-centred design isn't a trend, it's the only defensible position once you accept that products live or die by adoption. The tools available to any team had gotten dramatically better, more processing power, more bandwidth, more sophisticated customers, but the fundamentals of good design hadn't moved: solve a real problem, for a real person, in a specific moment.
At Feedzai the hard part was never believing that. It was building a process disciplined enough to act on it. We ran cooperative, participatory design work to find common ground with the people building fraud-fighting tools, and we held ourselves to a standard beyond usability: not just valuable, but something people would actually want to use.
That's where the idea of the Minimum Loveable Product came from, our answer to the MVP. An MVP proves a product works. An MLP asks for more: does it reduce the cognitive load of a hard job, does it give someone a sense of achievement, would they choose to use it again tomorrow. We measured that with a simple test, whether a customer would tell us, unprompted, that the tool had become part of how they worked.
Eight years and three companies later, I'd still sign my name to the core of it. The tools have changed considerably since 2018. The obligation to build something people actually want hasn't.