That’s a great idea. There is a software engineering concept called “ubiquitous language”, where an organization gets together and defines its own lexicon to facilitate cross-organizational communication. Concepts like “MVP”, “rough” and “polished” can be hard to really explain. Having a physical chairs in the office will allow us to point at them and say, “We are building you the MVP chair. You can sit on it, but you wouldn’t want to invite all your friends over to see it, or put too much weight on it.”.

@Martin, thanks for the comment and link. I’ve been toying with the idea of getting a few chairs made to different stages of completion (an MVP, a rough version, and finally a polished one) for the Kiva office. Put them in a meeting room and they can be used to drive home the idea – and purpose – of each stage. What do you think?

This is a great article by UX expert Harry Brignull on how starting from a bad product and trying to iterate on it will never create a high quality product:
http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2011/01/06/local-maxima-and-the-perils-of-data-driven-design/