Tip
Cameron Adams talks about building Canva’s MVP: “When we were building, the Lean Startup book came out, so that was all anyone talked to us about. Investors, other people building products, trying to give us advice. They were like, ‘Just get something out the door, as crappy as it is just to get in front of users.’” Canva ignored this advice and spent a year building before launch. Why? “It also worked for me who’d worked in a lot of creative tools and built a lot of creative tools over the previous 15 years. So I had a lot of understanding of how people interacted with these systems and the experience that we wanted to build.”
Turns out AI product strategy works the same way.
Every AI advisor tells you: “Just ship something. Get users now. Iterate based on feedback.” The advice is ubiquitous. But you’ve spent 15 years building enterprise software. You KNOW customers in regulated industries won’t tolerate half-baked AI agents making decisions without proper audit trails. You know they need explainability, rollback mechanisms, and compliance logging from day one. Those aren’t features you iterate toward—they’re table stakes.
Younger founders follow lean startup religiously because they don’t have the pattern recognition yet. They ship fast, get burned by enterprise customers who demand features they can’t retrofit, and rebuild. You can skip that cycle. Your domain expertise lets you ignore generic startup advice when you know better.
This isn’t arrogance—it’s applied knowledge. Cameron had built creative tools for 15 years. He knew users needed joy in the experience from minute one, not after iteration 47. You’ve implemented enough enterprise systems to know what “production ready” actually means in your domain. That knowledge gives you permission to ignore advice that doesn’t fit your context.
The pattern: generic startup advice assumes you’re exploring unknown territory. When you have deep domain expertise, you’re not exploring—you’re executing on patterns you’ve seen work repeatedly. Trust that.
Context
Cameron Adams co-founded Canva after working on Google Wave and building creative tools for 15 years. When they took a year to build their MVP despite investor pressure to “just ship something,” they were leveraging deep domain expertise about creative tools and user experience.
For experienced professionals building AI products in domains they know deeply (finance, healthcare, manufacturing), this pattern recognition is the advantage—you know which corners can’t be cut because you’ve seen the consequences of cutting them. Younger founders don’t have that calibration yet.