Minimum Viable Person

He didnt fight for his marriage. He scoped it.

When his wife asks for a separation, Joel Finch does what hes always done: he opens a new doc, defines the problem, and builds a sprint. He will optimize his way back to love—or at least to an acceptable retention rate.

The terrifying part? It works. Discovery interviews spark real conversation. Retrospectives unearth buried truths. For a few months, by every measurable metric, the marriage is better. Simone is softer. Joel is almost present. The roadmap is on track.

Then she finds the notebook.

Wickedly funny and quietly devastating, this novel skewers the productivity-obsessed, framework-addicted culture that has taught an entire generation to treat human beings like unsolved tickets in a backlog. But beneath the satire lives a genuinely urgent question: if the attention was real, the effort was real, and the results were real—does it matter that love was the deliverable?

A comedy about optimization. A tragedy about presence. An autopsy of a marriage conducted entirely in bullet points.

Pick it up before your next one-on-one.