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What is a minimum viable product (MVP)?

Watch the video to learn about the 'minimum viable product'.

In this video, product managers explain the concept of the minimum viable product (MVP).

In his 2011 book The Lean Startup, Eric Ries originally defined the MVP as ‘that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.’

When you’re solving problems for users, every solution is treated as an assumption until you can check it really meets user needs – in other words, until you can validate or invalidate the assumption.

‘Validated learning’ is the knowledge gained by a product team as they research and experiment with different solutions until they find the one that really works for users.

Eric Ries originally intended MVP to be a term that covered paper prototypes, videos, and/or manual provision of a service that could be provided digitally (simply put, anything that could help us to cheaply and efficiently test our assumptions) but it is increasingly interpreted more generally as ‘the first version that generates value for the user.’

This is an important distinction. Your MVP is not just something that ‘works’ based on your own standards or your organisation’s internal criteria, but something that works as the user needs it to.

For this reason, you should still try to follow agile principles as you design your user research. Doing so will allow you to ‘fail fast’, an agile principle that means identifying and fixing failures in your design as quickly and cheaply as possible. It also involves being confident enough to bin early designs that aren’t working so you can switch focus and effort to more promising ideas.

You release a minimum viable product because:

  • you can deliver something to users quickly to see if it works and how it will work
  • you do not want to waste extra development effort or money for something you are not sure will work

In the commercial world, you might also release an MVP to gauge interest in your product.

As a product manager, you will regularly have to review what the first iteration or version you want to deliver to users contains – the specifics may change several times before you even reach the MVP stage!

It is important to understand how the MVP fits into agile development. It is generally released at the private beta stage, after the initial user research during discovery and the iterative testing of various solutions during the alpha phase.

The MVP is the first working version that generates value for the user (and your organisation) by fulfilling a user need. It will not contain all the features and functionality of the final, public version of the product, since these are added or refined using user feedback data from private beta testing and iterated through the live phase.

Problems are identified and solved during the two beta phases and into the live, but these iterations are initially derived from user interaction with the MVP and the data and insight that their feedback and your continued user research generates for the team.


MVP example from daily life

Let’s look at an everyday example – an electric kettle.

Fundamentally, kettles are products designed to boil water. Some modern electric kettles have additional features, such as controls to heat water to specific temperatures, but the fundamental user need that these products meet is the need to boil water.

But you don’t actually need an electric kettle to do that.

What you need to boil water can be much simpler, such as a pan you can fill with water and place on a gas hob. (Or maybe even simpler – a heat-proof container over a fire!)

An electric kettle is therefore not an MVP. It is an improved version of the MVP (in this case, a basic pan on the hob) that allows the user to boil water more quickly and with far less effort.

Even an older kettle that we would heat on a gas hob is not an MVP. It has an improved shape, which helps water boil more quickly than in an open pan, and a spout, which helps with pouring. These features are designed for convenience and efficiency, but the user can still meet their basic need of boiling water without them.

Whatever the user need, the simplest product that meets it is the MVP.

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Introduction to Product Management

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