Cindy Alvarez writes about customer development, user interviews, and product management for startups.
HN commenters give no opinion of the blog itself; it is linked for startup and product management advice, such as customer interviews and MVP testing.
I think this can still be considered an intermediate MVP that can be tested. The goal of lean is to eliminate waste, so there is a risk that an MVP with working code has no demand whatsoever.
One drawback to this approach is that it may give you false negatives. What if you landing page copy doesn't work or your AdWords copy is wrong? As with all lean/custdev hacks ymmv. Bottom line is you need to find customers to talk to, otherwise everything is an assumption.
Some other articles that touch on this approach:
http://startupbound.com/how-i-quickly-test-and-validate-startup-ideas/
http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2008/11/using-adwords-to-assess-demand-for-your.html
http://www.cindyalvarez.com/best-practices/customer-development-interviews-how-to-finding-people
I worked for a small company when my wife had our children. I was the first employee to have a child while at the job. I was lucky enough to be senior enough to negotiate the parental leave that I needed.
It was unpaid. My employer did not force me to take vacation time, which was kind of them.
A month or two before I left, the COO created a parental leave policy, and I was glad to see it codified.
This was a company with under 25 employees, but they could have benefited from this post (and this one, which the OP linked to: http://www.cindyalvarez.com/best-practices/its-not-okay-to-not-have-a-parental-leave-policy ).