This thing called a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

I hear it being thrown around quite a lot these days. Do they really mean “V1”?

Here are a few things you should know regarding the concept of the“Minimum Viable Product”:

The Lean Startup

Eric Ries wrote this book called “The Lean Startup”. The term derived from the idea that there is a better way for a company to quickly and cost-effectively validate a products traction in any given marketplace. This is done through building the (most reasonably) smallest thing in order to quickly validate and learn from the customer. The important keyword here is “Learn”.

Smaller Experiments for Faster Learning

Ask yourself, what’s the simplest, functional thing you can build in order to learn and validate it’s value to any assumed customer? Sure, it may not win any awards right from the start, however, if money is a big factor in your business (assuming this is the case for 100 percent of businesses?) and you’re not a hundred percent sure whether or not your offering will garner any traction, then wouldn’t it make sense to conduct a cheap experiment for something you’re unsure of early on? I can imagine it would save you more in design and development costs in the long run if you learn a bit about how much value your offering will provide with the least amount of overhead.

Similar to sprint planning or any other sort of strategic initiative, there should be a strategy in place for what you actually want to learn from any given experiment.

Keep in mind, this all happens very early on in the product strategy process, well in advance of development. A properly executed design sprint can help with framing of this. After release, if you learn something, have that inform the next iteration and test again. The idea is to create a environment of continuous learning that helps to evolve your offering.If executed well, there’s a chance that you’re original assumptions were going to go in the wrong direction and thanks to the process, you catch that early on. Think about how much time and money that saves you in the long run.

It’s Not an MVP if _______

If you don’t measure, learn and iterate on your shipped “MVP”, then it’s really just a shitty release. If you just release what you assume is a Minimally Viable Product (regardless of how minimal it is in functionality) and keep moving forward on your next set of features without ever measuring it’s effectiveness and improving on it, it’s not an MVP.

So there you have it, the concept of the “MVP” in a nutshell. There are many things that you can add to this list, but this is really in my opinion, the essence of the oh-so-popular Minimum Viable Product.