A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a concept taken from The Lean Startup, a book that is often seen as a sort of bible for tech startups in early stages.
Defined by Eric Ries on his blog an MVP:
“Is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort”.
Seems simple enough.
But here’s the problem: a lot of teams, agencies, founders etc. often approach an MVP with the mindset of which features can we remove so that we are in budget rather than which features are absolutely not needed for us to get the maximum amount of validated learning.
This is important and is summarised in the same blog post linked above by:
“The definition’s use of the words maximum and minimum means it is decidedly not formulaic. It requires judgment to figure out, for any given context, what MVP makes sense”.
Cost is of course important for many reasons. But try not to approach an MVP in the way that many do; consulting with a developer on a feature list and having them strip it down based on reducing costs. You’ll often end up with something that people just don’t want to use.
As an example, if a goal of your MVP is to answer the question ‘is there a demand for this service’ so that you can prove to investors there’s a market, that can seem simple enough. But features are an important part of creating an experience that customers will enjoy and therefore actually use. A push notification strategy might not seem totally essential right now for the MVP, but what is the cost to your user experience of removing it? It could be the difference between someone returning to your app twice, or never.
Perhaps a potential solution for the ‘requires judgement’ problem is to look at the features removed or added as removing or adding user motivation; therefore usage, and in turn removing or adding that data point/learning. As usual focusing on the user is a good thing.
It’s a minimum product, but you want maximum learnings, or essentially ‘proof’. Too often in MVP’s these are both minimum.
