If you're a sports fan you may be wondering why a Digital Marketing PM is worried about an MVP, the stand-out athlete of the game. While very important, to some, it's not MVP’s only meaning. The growth of Agile redefines the three letter acronym to "Minimum Viable Product".

"Minimum Viable Product"

This and other new project management and product development processes have recognised something important in how projects deliver their products or outcomes. We recognise that not only is "perfect" sometimes impossible to attain (or at least very expensive and time consuming), sometimes it really doesn't matter. There’s usually a new feature that will give a better return on investment than perfecting an old one.

To understand this, a fundamental aspect of Agile, we need to look at what came before, the dirty laundry of the project management world, application of "Waterfall" methodology to every project.

"the dirty laundry of project management"

Waterfall meant that the person who set the goals of the project, the product owner, set them, how they would be addressed and set the full solution to a particular problem. Maybe three, six or even twenty-four months later, the project team would duly deliver that complete product to the new owners with a stack of documentation and walk away.

Sometimes that worked but the vast majority of the time the product owner looked at what was delivered, realised that it was no longer relevant to the problem, which might have changed in the two year development cycle, and went to the project team with a long list of problems to be fixed before going live.

“what was delivered...was no longer relevant”

That’s more time spent where the project has not solved anyone’s problem. Three years after the problem was identified, a customer would still not have seen a single benefit.

Agile starts off in the same way, define the project goals, set the major benefits and start working towards them. There will be a period when nothing is delivered outside the core team (though that includes the product owner). But then everything changes. As soon the product begins to deliver benefit, the MVP is released. Maybe to a “beta” group or maybe to the public.

“as soon as the product begins to deliver benefit, the MVP is released”

What happens next is a secret of Agile. The Waterfall project may take as long to close using Agile; if it took three years in Waterfall, it may still take three years in the Agile world. The difference is that because it delivered an MVP to end-users early, at that final milestone Agile has already been identifying real-world issues and reaping benefits for months or even years. It has also been receiving constant feedback since the first release and that has gone to making a better, more fit for purpose, stronger product.

The MVP works to improve the situation incrementally, with the ultimate goal of delivering a complete product whatever that might be once the process completes. On the way, “a release early, release often” approach helps to achieve that.

For Waterfall – delivery day might also be the point where the out-of-date product is shelved, never to see the light of day.

How do you identify the content of an MVP? How do you ensure that you don’t spend too much resources in your frequent release cycle? All solvable problems for another discussion.

MVP image courtesy Newt Designs under CC Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license

Circuit image courtesy Hoikka1 under CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license