Eric Ries is a cult among start up enthusiasts. His book The Lean Startup is almost the holy bible for start up founders and aspiring /dreaming start up founders. Besides the lean framework that has become the mantra of core workflows in all start ups, he has given us another term, that has been used and mostly abused by most. MVP.

“A 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”

Well thats one heck of a definition. Lets not get ourselves taken in by the beauty of the literature and dive deep into the jargons.

Validated learning

As innocuous the term may sound, this forms the very base of the definition of a MVP. Validated learning differs from any other form of learning. Validated learning is the insight that you get from an MVP experiment that happens in an test environment and there is no bias in the customers who are your target audience in terms of demography or even their behaviour.

MVP is not the product prototype. ITS NOT EVEN A THING

Now I see some eyes rolling. Well, MVP is not a thing, it is a process. Lets see a real life example. Say you are driving enthusiast and you are driving through a town. And suddenly you are presented with a fork in the road. What should you do?

Well in the real world you would be tempted to ask people in the town and understand which road leads to your destination? But can you really trust them? What if they are congenital liars? Or they dont like travellers? The fact is that you are making a wild assumption that has too many things going against it. So you have to traverse each path and decide. The process of traversing a minimum distance of each path with minimum effort and coming to the conclusion is known as MVP. So this scenario, the faster you fail and faster you learn and faster you go for the next option. Thank You, Eric. You are the reason that every motivation speaker has the FAIL FAST in their speech.

The process of traversing a minimum distance of each path with minimum effort and coming to the conclusion is known as MVP

The PROCESS

You may not know it yet, but everyone more or less follows the same process. However a streamlined process actually can make you life a lot easier. Yes, I can already hear the developers cursing. Believe me these steps matter.

Ideate: The solution you are trying to build

Assumption :Make assumptions on what has to be true for your product to be a rousing success. Then choose the riskiest assumption.

Hypothesis: Assumptions are clumsy. Hypothesis are made to make those assumptions more structure, actionable and result oriented. In most cases you can us this template and you will do just fine

“We believe TG will ACTION because REASON”

MCS: Well if MVP is the experiment, there must be an outcome. We need to set this criteria to evaluate whether MVP experiment was a success or a failure

Strategy: How are you planning to run the experiment. It can be the dropbox approach of a minimal website and queue or Zappos buying shoes from the store next door and delivering it to its customers.

Execute : This is pretty straight forward. Speed is the key

Iterate: Word says it all

PS: A MVP is not only for a new product. The MVP approach works perfectly well with the new feature updates or integrations.

MVP is a necessary evil. The process might sometimes be excruciating but the results are often rewarding