Why is your Minimal Viable Product (MVP) really just a PoS
vincentjordan.com
vincentjordan.com
The "minimum viable" product is the product that does the minimum set of things to be viable.
Viability and quality are usually orthogonal concerns. Viability and polish are especially likely to be orthogonal.
There are markets you can serve in which polish matters a great deal. Not coincidentally, these are markets covered carefully by people like Robert Scoble. Whether you're going to need to genuflect to Scoble's notion of your "viability" is an important question to address when choosing the market you want to serve.
The problem with MVP is people assume it's about how the adjectives "minimum" and "viable" apply to the noun "product" which is too a view (but one I had myself before actually reading TLS). The reality is it is just a placeholder for the process of lean validated learning.
It's also a factor of people spreading themselves too thin. You don't have to do a dozen features and make them all minimal. Do the 2 or 3 that are core to the application and make them full-featured. Who knows? That might be all you need.
If I can't use your product for what it's meant to do, then is it really a minimum viable product?
We already have another term for software that doesn't yet exist: vaporware.
What I hate most are the landing pages setup to gauge interest. Usually they have a name like:
"Flrghx.ly: social meets socal"
Which, of course, tells me everything. Throw in a few logos, like TechCrunch, Memefest, Facepalm, and CNN, and a few quotes from JS from SF, California on how he "Finally can socialize his socal social-mates using Flrghx on his iPhone."
And then you have the "Hey give us your email! We won't spam you, we promise, we hate spam! But after 7 months of not hearing from us, we'll notify you of our launch, and then we'll subscribe you to our newsletter, and then send you updates that include notifications from our sponsors. But no spam!"
Oh, and if I retween a tweet, I'll increase my chances to get into beta. If I post to my Facebook, then it doubles that increase!. And every friend that gives an email increases my chances! OMG! It's like a beta-pyramid scheme. Next they'll be pitching me Aetna.
Plenty of businesses have bootstrapped to customers with nothing but vapor. I've been on (extremely good) teams that got their ass handed to them in version 3.0 by vapor pitches.
These are really orthogonal issues. How complete your product is, how polished it is, how few bugs it have, these things usually have less of an impact on your "viability" than nerds think it does (unless you're serving nerds, graphic designers, or competing with Twitter).
The standard that I hold myself to is whether or not the product provides value to the user or customer. Does it do something new or interesting that someone (besides your team) cares about, or is it just the first part of something that you hope will provide value? It's tempting to jump the gun, and I think honesty on the part of those around you can help keep you from releasing a minimum, non-viable, product.
Unfortunately, this is awfully hard for nerds like us to do. One way I know this to be true is by watching people who have an easy time of it hustle through customer meetings, taking a product idea from zero to "purchase order" with nothing but some static web pages.
@justjimmy, as for my understanding of what MVP is — there actually needs to be an actual functioning product... although, Eric himself does mention in his 'Lean Startup book' to products that qualify under the MVP title with just a video (Dropbox) and a Concierge service (don't remember the product)... I do find it weird that he mentions those as qualifying, since they really just validate the business model.
One of his (Eric) simplest definitions for a MVP was a product that could easily go through a full cycle in the lean.feedback loop: https://skitch.com/vince.baskerville/gixq3/mvp-feedback-loop which should/hopefully help distill what customers want & thus actually pay for.
Validation is exactly what you're seeking, especially in the earlier phases of the learn startup / customer development process. The whole point is to get validated learning as early as possible, and eliminate waste, where "waste" is "building something nobody wants."
It's also important to remember that this "lean startup" / "customer development" stuff is meant to be an iterative process. Your MVP today might not be the same as your MVP a month from now, or a year from now.
Edit: from Eric Ries himself[1]:
First, a definition: the minimum viable product 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.
[1]: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/08/minimum-viable-...
My biggest beef with the lean startup philosophy is it seems to encourage engineers away from working on deep, hard problems for a long time. It's all too easy to release something basic too early, see it inevitably "fail", and decide to "pivot" based upon this. I feel this is often a symptom of a deeper disease: either not having courage in your convictions or not building something that you could see yourself (or someone you know) using regularly. In short: in creative endeavors it is sometimes healthy to have bias in your views based upon intuition and not direct evidence ("I don't care what the A/B test said, we're going with this idea anyway") because sometimes this intuition can lead you down corners that break you out of local minima up to another plateau.
But it doesn't. If the result of working a deep, hard problem is a solution that the world obviously needs, then the LS methodology does not push doing "MVPs" or whatever. So if you're working on a cure for cancer, or a cheap, clean, renewable energy source, you wouldn't be following this model in the first place. The whole "lean startup" / "customer development" approach is meant for dealing with case of extreme uncertainty, and especially in regards to market/customer knowledge.
It's all too easy to release something basic too early, see it inevitably "fail", and decide to "pivot" based upon this.
Anybody who does that doesn't understand the Lean Startup approach, and isn't doing it right. Every change isn't a "pivot" and you don't go pivoting at arbitrary points just because of an isolated bit of negative feedback. The idea is to find a market for the original idea, as conceived, and pivot only if a market cannot be found (or created) for that.
I feel this is often a symptom of a deeper disease: either not having courage in your convictions or not building something that you could see yourself (or someone you know) using regularly. In short: in creative endeavors it is sometimes healthy to have bias in your views based upon intuition and not direct evidence ("I don't care what the A/B test said, we're going with this idea anyway") because sometimes this intuition can lead you down corners that break you out of local minima up to another plateau.
Agreed... there is a place for vision and intuition sometimes. Unfortunately there's no easy way to know when your intuition is actually leading somewhere. It's a battle we all face.
What seems to make sense to me is to simply follow the name. It is the minimum work for a viable product. A splash screen is not a product. A video is not a product. A wireframe is not the product (unless it contains the minimum form of the product). Thus, all of these are not MVPs.
Determining if something is a product should be easy. Determining what is minimum but still viable is much harder.
If somebody builds a crappy app, pushes it to the world, and slaps an "MVP" label on it, they haven't built an MVP and they're not really following the lean startup / customer development process.
I know that would be my tendency. I'd need someone crazy helping me jump into trouble: http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/inventors-who-want-to-do-bu...