What is an MVP (Minimum Viable Product)?
The concept of Minimum Viable Product (MVP) comes from the Lean Startup methodology, emphasizing the importance of learning in creating new products. Eric Ries characterized the MVP as the version of a product that allows a team to maximize customer learning with minimum effort. This learning is validated by knowing if customers are ready to buy the product.
The core idea of the MVP is to create a real product (which can be just a landing page or a service that seems automated but is actually manual in the background) that you can offer to customers to observe their real behavior with the product or service. Observing people's real actions is much more reliable than relying on their statements about what they would do.
Anticipated benefits
The main advantage of an MVP is that it allows you to understand the interest of customers in your product before developing it completely. The sooner you find out if the product is appealing to customers, the less effort and costs you'll spend on a product that may not be successful in the marketplace.
Common mistakes
Teams use the term MVP without really understanding its use or meaning. This misunderstanding is often expressed in the belief that the MVP is the minimum quantity of deliverable features, without considering the learning criterion on the commercial viability of the product.
Teams may mistake an MVP, oriented to learning, with a Feature or Minimum Marketable Product (MMF/MMP), oriented to profit. It's not seriously damaging unless the team focuses exclusively on delivery without worrying about meeting the customer's needs.
Teams focus on the “minimum” MVP, at the expense of “viability.” The product delivered does not reach sufficient quality to properly assess whether customers will use it.
Teams deliver a product that they consider to be an MVP and then don't change it anymore, regardless of the feedback received.
Potential costs
Appropriate use of an MVP can lead a team to radically change a product they offer to their customers or to abandon the product altogether, based on customer feedback. The “minimum” aspect of MVP encourages teams to work as little as possible to get useful feedback (Eric Ries talks about validated learning), which helps them avoid working on an unwanted product.
Origins
2009: The MVP concept became popular after Eric Ries described it in his book “The Lean Startup.”
Signs of Effective Use
A team effectively uses the MVP as a key part of an experimentation strategy. It hypothesizes that customers have a specific need that their product is supposed to satisfy. The team then deploys something to these customers to check if, in reality, they will use the product to meet these needs. Based on the information gathered from this experience, the team decides whether to continue, modify, or stop working on the product.
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