Image: A minimum viable product, Wilbur Wright at Kitty Hawk, 1903, Library of Congress.

The MVP, or minimum viable product, is a term made popular by Eric Ries in the Lean Startup. These days every product team, startup and developer is talking about their MVP. But what is it exactly and how does it help?

I believe the MVP is often misunderstood, both in terms of what it actually looks like and how it helps to develop better products. To me it describes a philosophy, a culture, a way to live and breath your product. And it’s this idea that is misunderstood and applied incorrectly almost everywhere I look.

Minimal Products aren't always Viable

I was recently asked to provide some advice and feedback on a product. It’s great that the team were collecting feedback before they launched. Sadly they didn’t have a MVP to feedback on. They had a product, it was certainly minimal, it just wasn’t viable.

The team had dropped a considerable amount of money, they had already missed two important deadlines and were well on course to miss a third. There was a huge number of features on the roadmap and so the product was being architected to ensure they’d be able to support all these features in the future. That meant a huge amount of architecture design and build to underpin features that had no users and very little evidence they would ever be needed.

Aside from all the additional effort to get your first product out there so you can start validating it, it chains you to your roadmap. A roadmap should be flexible, describing the priorities you see today. It should be updated regularly with things being added, and most importantly, removing the things that are no longer important. If you’ve already architected the product to support some of these items it’s going to be that much harder to justify removing them.

Once this type of thinking takes hold it's hard to stop. The team had also included a number of non-functional requirements that appeared hard to justify at this stage. I was left wondering how successful the Wright brothers would have been had they set out to build a commercial passenger airliner in the first iteration.

Minimum Viable Lifestyle

When I left my last full time position my family and I started planning six months in advance. We knew there would be a period of uncertainty as I transitioned from a full time salary to more unpredictable forms of income. We trained ourselves to live off a fraction of our monthly income. We cut out many luxury purchases until we hit a target monthly living cost that my friends and family still find hard to believe we can survive off.

When I finally quit there was no shock, we were used to it and we knew how long we could comfortably survive. Living like this became natural and, I must say, quite rewarding. We found innovative new ways to have fun and do activities as a family. Before we would have gone out to spend money. Now we simply enjoyed the world around us, walking and exploring.

Even when the money started to come in again we maintained the same lifestyle. We took so much pleasure from it. At the same time large purchases became much easier. With money coming in, but a low cost of living, making large purchases (or bets) became a lot less risky and therefore easier.

We had created a minimal viable lifestyle which we quickly came to love. It gave us more options than when we spent more money, it gave us more freedom to make decisions on what to do next. And it’s this way of thinking that underpins the minimum viable product.

MVP is a way of life

The MVP isn’t about getting something quick and dirty out there. It’s about doing something that gives you options and freedom. The simpler you start out the more options you’ll have. The more creative the feedback will be. Some of the best ideas in your product will come from how your users use it. If you’ve corralled them into a tiny pen they’ll only move in the direction of the barriers you’ve artificially constructed.

For the product to be minimally viable it has to be able to DO something first before it can do something at scale or before it does something + x. Users need to be able to clearly understand what it can do today and they will soon tell you where they’d dream of going next. Building a MVP means you need to forget nearly everything you think people want or need and build something they can use tomorrow without too much effort. The MVP is your gamble, it’s your hypothesis that will be tested, it’s best not to bet too big. And it’s best not to get into the habit of betting big as you’ll always lose more bets than you win.