Comment by brikis98 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brikis98 | Hacker News Reader

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As with any term that becomes a "buzzword" (e.g., DevOps, Lean, Agile), the definition of MVP definitely gets muddled and everyone has their own take on it. I could replace the term with "how to build products by repeatedly identifying your riskiest assumptions and building the smallest possible experiment to test them", but I think "MVP" is a bit easier to read.

> This article is more about "how to find out what an MVP might be".

This sounds a bit tautological. An MVP is the smallest possible experiment to test your assumptions. To find out what that experiment should be, you have to do an experiment to test assumptions...

Also, one of the key ideas in the article is this is not something you do once to build a single MVP. It's a process you use over and over again to develop every aspect of your business, including the product, marketing strategy, software architecture, etc. For example, to build a large software system, you don't write 100,000 lines of code, then hit compile, and hope it works. Instead, you do it incrementally. Write a few lines of code, test them, make sure they work; write a few more lines of code, test them, make sure they work, and so on. Or to quote John Gall, "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked."

> Adding an extra feature nobody needs means you've not built a minimum product.

This reminds me of the No true Scotsman fallacy [1].

"No MVP should have unnecessary features."

"But that successful company's MVP had all sorts of unnecessary features."

"Yes, but no true MVP should have unnecessary features."

This sort of critique isn't wrong, but it's not useful. How do you figure out which features are necessary and which ones aren't? The best way I've found to do that is to pick your riskiest assumption and to test it. And to do that over and over again, incrementally building up your product as you go. If you don't like the term MVP for that, I suppose that's fair, but then please suggest a better term to replace it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

> the definition of MVP definitely gets muddled and everyone has their own take on it.

I'm quite surprised by this, since to me there's little to disagree about. A "minimum viable product" seems like a very simple description to me.

> An MVP is the smallest possible experiment to test your assumptions.

I'm not sure where this is coming from, unless what you get out of it is a viable product, how is it an MVP?

I'm not saying you shouldn't experiment, or that you shouldn't build small things and try them out, but I see no reason to keep referring to something as a minimum viable product when it meets none of the three words.

> This reminds me of the No true Scotsman fallacy [1].

Again, I'm not really sure why what I've said seems so odd. If it's not the smallest viable product then how is it a minimum viable product? If it's not a viable product, again, it's not an MVP.

This is more like reading an article that says "A Scotsman doesn't need to be Scottish or even a person".

> This sort of critique isn't wrong, but it's not useful.

I feel it is, since I think the concept of an MVP is pretty important because at the end of it you have a viable product. If people are going to use the term MVP to describe proofs of concepts and mockups and a general process, then what term do you suggest should replace it for actually describing minimum viable products?

This reminds me of the discussion on the definition of "Object Oriented". It's a term of art that means a specific thing in the context of programming. [1]

"Minimum Viable Product" is also a term of art to describe a specific concept and can't really be broken down word by word. If you look at Eric Ries, Steve Blank, and Frank Robinson they have a specific meaning for MVP that matches The Macro article.

See for example [2] where Reis says "It is not necessarily the smallest product imaginable, though; it is simply the fastest way to start learning how to build a sustainable business with the minimum amount of effort."

[1] See this hilarious interchange http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?HeInventedTheTerm [2] The previously mentioned http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/19/dropbox-minimal-viable-prod...

Okay, I'm reading the TechCrunch article you linked to, and I come across this:

In this case, the video was the minimum viable product. The MVP validated Drew’s leap-of-faith assumption that customers wanted the product he was developing not because they said so in a focus group or because of a hopeful analogy to another business, but because they actually signed up.

I think this is a very interesting quote. For one thing, it urges us to expand our notion of what a product is. It isn't necessarily an actual working piece of software; it can be a mock-up or faked demo -- but in any case it's still something that can be shown to potential customers.

But the question that some of us are raising is, when could the video be called an MVP? The answer we would suggest is, it becomes an MVP only after it receives an enthusiastic response from the market. Note that the Ries quote is completely consistent with this interpretation: by the time Ries wrote it, the video had received such a response. Our argument is that while Drew Houston was making the video, it wasn't an MVP yet: it was only an experiment, an attempt at making an MVP, but not yet a validated MVP.

So I disagree that "MVP" is "a term of art and can't really be broken down word by word". Rather, I think that people haven't understood exactly what Ries and Blank mean by it.

yes, this.

Very few people in the Lean Startup world (for example any Lean Startup event or conference) who use the methodology in their own business or coach others see MVP as a Product. Everyone agrees MVP = Experiment.

That's the problem with coining a phrase that gets popular. It starts out as one thing that is not necessarily 100% correct. Then it's too late to change it once you understand it better and understand how to implement it.

If you are correct, they basically fail at English language/marketing.

That's like saying the Most Valuable Player is the fan that provided the most value to a player. You named it wrong.

Well, that's one way to look at it. Another is to say that it was perfectly clear what it meant when it was coined - redefining the idea of "product" to mean "something that gives you feedback on your plan", rather than "something people can use". It was the idea that you don't need anything more at this stage, not a "real" product.

Sure, without the history people won't understand it, but then that's true of most terms in most fields, and I'm really not sure if there is a way to prevent it.

Remember, naming things is hard.

Not that hard.

Minimum useful experiment

Minimum viable prototype

> I'm quite surprised by this, since to me there's little to disagree about. A "minimum viable product" seems like a very simple description to me.

I've found a lot of confusion about the term. Just a few of the many examples I've read: https://hbr.org/2013/09/building-a-minimum-viable-prod/, http://tynerblain.com/blog/2012/09/11/why-do-products-fail-i..., http://paulkortman.com/2012/11/21/the-problem-with-a-lean-st..., https://medium.com/@maxdunn/when-the-minimum-viable-product-..., http://www.romanpichler.com/blog/minimum-viable-product-and-..., http://www.svpg.com/minimum-viable-product, http://andrewchen.co/minimum-desirable-product/, http://www.startupblender.com/minimum-viable-product-vs-mini..., http://blog.invisionapp.com/minimum-viable-product-mutants/, https://validately.com/leancustomerresearch/death-minimal-vi....

Note how many of the articles above try to redefine the phrase to reduce confusion, such as "Minimum Delightful Product" or "Minimum Marketable Product." There is confusion about every part of MVP: what "minimum" means, what "viable" means, and what "product" means.

> If it's not the smallest viable product then how is it a minimum viable product? If it's not a viable product, again, it's not an MVP.

How do you do know if it's "smallest" or "viable"? Walk me through your process.

> If people are going to use the term MVP to describe proofs of concepts and mockups and a general process, then what term do you suggest should replace it for actually describing minimum viable products?

Based on the massive confusion around the term MVP, as you can see in the articles I linked above, I think it's fair to say that you need more than an acronym to understand what to do. That's why I tried to define it as a process. Will that fix all the confusion in the world? Of course not. But I hope that focusing on a mindset instead of a product will help at least a little bit.

"How do you do know if it's "smallest" or "viable"?"

There will be done uncertainty, as all possibilities cannot be tested. But just because something is hard or even impossible to identify, it does not mean the concept is not valid.

My question was for IanCal, but since you chose to answer it, I'm happy to ask you the same thing: when you go to build an MVP, how do you decide if what you're doing is the "smallest" or if it will be "viable"? Walk me through your actual process.

Hmm, perhaps you're right on the confusion, though the quote

> So, the minimum viable product is that product which has just those features (and no more) that allows you to ship a product that resonates with early adopters; some of whom will pay you money or give you feedback.

Seems pretty clear to me, perhaps the trickiness comes around whether or not absolutely anything that gets feedback is an MVP? I don't get how you'd say with a straight face that you shipped a product when what you actually did was go around with a questionnaire.

> How do you do know if it's "smallest" or "viable"?

You explicitly chose situations where there were extra, unused features and where the product as a whole was completely useless. If you have a product with more features than you needed, you can't really say you succeeded in making the minimum viable product, and if you have a product nobody wants is it really sensible to refer to it as a viable product?

Is the startup world at such a point that nobody knows what might constitute a viable product? Sure, there's some blurred points around not-yet-profitable-but-growing things, but if your target audience finds your thing absolutely useless is it really that unclear?

> Walk me through your process.

Again, I have no problem with the process and it's a shame this has picked up so much attention instead of actual discussion around that. I just don't want to have to deal with the following conversations:

"We've built an MVP"

"Great! How did the launch go?"

"Launch? Oh my no, we've just finished a focus group session. The next MVP is at 4pm if you want to sit in."

> I think it's fair to say that you need more than an acronym to understand what to do.

Yes, this is true, which is surely why we already have terms like market research. I just don't understand what benefit calling market research "building an MVP" has.

My initial criticism was that you'd redefined what I thought was a well understood term. If I'm wrong about that (which I seem to be) then I'd change my criticism to "If something is poorly understood, please don't redefine it to mean something different again". When I see a title like "X isn't X, it's Y" my immediate thought is that someone is trying to give an old idea a new name to make it more current and sexy, that may not be fair but it's my first reaction to this kind of thing.

Perhaps I just need to step back from all this for a while. Perhaps in this world you really can refer to a marketing video as a viable product, and I'm a crazed outsider. I'd hoped to be clear about simple definitions of words yet caused/opened up even more confusion and disagreement, so I guess I've failed at my minimal useful comment.

> An MVP is the smallest possible experiment to test your assumptions.

This is the point that IanCal and I are disagreeing with. An experiment should be called an experiment. What you get after you've done enough experiments to validate your assumptions is an MVP.

Maybe we need the abbreviation "MVPA" for "MVP Attempt".

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