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A Minimum Viable Product Is Not a Product, It’s a Process

120 points by ctdean 11y ago

anjc 11y ago
Yeah I saw this on Reddit too. I'm not sure what the point of the article is. It references Ries in passing as if it's only vaguely relevant, and proceeds to say precisely what Ries said 10 years ago in the first few pages of probably the most prolific book in the startup community. It then tries to make the article more relevant by conflating Lean with Agile and suggesting that they're both only vaguely relevant, when the entire article is specifically talking about Lean concepts. (And I say all this as someone who hated The Lean Startup). ??
IanCal 11y ago
I thoroughly disagree with misusing terms like this. Experimentation and the like are important, but that doesn't mean you get to throw away the term "minimum viable product". This article is more about "how to find out what an MVP might be". > An MVP is not just a product with half of the features chopped out Right, it's supposed to be the absolute core of what is necessary. This requires actually knowing what your customers want. It's perfectly OK to say "I don't know what our MVP should be" and then go and try and find out what it should be. But until you have something that is actually viable as a product then you don't have a MVP. > You spend months figuring out how to launch custom mobile apps for your clients, only to find out that what a restaurant owner really wants is a mobile-optimized website that’s easy to find on Google. So you added an extra feature that's unwanted and failed to add a required feature. This is neither minimum, nor viable. > Or, after using all the latest technologies to build real-time chat, you find out that restaurant owners can barely deal with email and don’t want to sit at a computer all day. Adding an extra feature nobody needs means you've not built a minimum product. > Or, worst of all, you might find out that restaurant owners don’t want the hassle of dealing with technology and maintaining mobile apps and have no interest in using your product in the first place. Then you haven't built a viable product. > Therefore, the very first MVP could be a mockup of such a mobile app Not really, since this isn't a viable product. edit - I think this is a common issue, people taking terms and then bringing in what they "really mean". A "minimum viable product" is a very simple description. If what you have isn't a viable product, then I really do not understand the point of saying you've built a minimum viable product.
- brikis98 11y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
  - IanCal 11y ago
    > 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?
vezycash 11y ago
A more fitting title for the article could be, "Building your MVP the right way." The whole point of an MVP is to avoid spending time and other resources building stuff no one wants or the wrong solution to problems. Therefore the article is a cheat sheet to lean thinking. 1. Draw a mockup, Table of content, vision statement 2. Talk to the target customer as often as possible to clarify every aspect of what you're building 3. If you want to sell your product, nothing says you're on the right path better than paying customers 4. You shouldn't stop validating decisions after you've hit some success eg. Facebook and Google conduct hundreds of thousands of micro experiments on live users to determine button placements, colour choice, increase sign up rate... So in summary, don't drop the MVP mindset when you hit some level of success. Fail fast, and more importantly, fail often. Be a scientist.
mstolpm 11y ago
If something is called a "product", then its in search for users. If its called "process", then its the way to do something. The author exchanges the terms – but mixing both will get you nowhere while both are neccessary to succeed: You don't go from zero to MVP but have to develop a process to create a working MVP.
muxme 11y ago
I'm learning this with my website (http://muxme.com http://muxme.com), which is only a month old. I've pivoted about a hundred times, which makes me question what truth is, because literally every bit of copy, UX flow, and strategy has changed. Yesterday the site was personal, friendly, and quirky. Today the site attempts to create the illusion that we're multiple people operating a business. The one truth that is true and universal is that people can enter and win with no purchase necessary, which is what the website revolves around.
hobaak 11y ago
I give author credit how to break down MVP process easy enough to execute fast. Folks startup isn't academia. Please do not discuss purity of this article against lean.
Alex3917 11y ago
I have to agree with the other commenters, the logic is super muddled here. Building an MVP is a process, and determining when you have an MVP and can now launch is a process. But an MVP itself is emphatically a product.
applecore 11y ago
>The problem is that these teams do not understand the point of an MVP. [...] In fact, the MVP doesn’t have to be a product at all. By definition, a minimum viable product is always a product: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/08/minimum-viable-product-guide.html http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/08/minimum-viable-...
- brikis98 11y ago
  That article, and Eric Ries' book, define an MVP as a "version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort." A "version of a new product" doesn't have to be a product. The classic example of an MVP that Eric Ries uses is the explainer video Drew Houston created for DropBox before building the actual product [1]. The video worked as an MVP by helping Houston test his assumptions, but I don't think you could say the video itself was a "product." [1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/19/dropbox-minimal-viable-product/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/19/dropbox-minimal-viable-prod...
hywel 11y ago
This article is totally on-point. MVPs are the minimal viable test for confirming your hypotheses. While running a startup consultancy, the idea that MVP is a thing you make once before going on to make the 'real' product, was one of the two biggest misconceptions I saw. The other one was "lean means cheap". I ended up realising that most startup resources explain these crucial things with misleading terms and a confusing way. Really, the whole process should mirror the scientific method - I started teaching my clients based on that, telling them to forget what they'd already heard. I'm writing a book at the moment about this (working title: The Rational Startup) but that's a subject for another HN submission :)
goodJobWalrus 11y ago
The definition I found, and it works for me is: MVP is a tool to test an assumption: Ask: * What are you trying to learn with this particular MVP? * What data are you collecting about your experiment? * What determines success or failure of the experiment? I am not sure you can figure out in advance what is your riskiest assumption (like to OP suggests), it's more likely to be obvious in hindsight.
jaynate 11y ago
I agree with the sentiment wholeheartedly. MVP has been bastardized in most shops I have been in. What's actually built is a "minimally compliant product." We need a better name for the idea that we are searching for something valuable for customers to buy. How about Market Viable Product which is the anticipated end result of the process of searching for product/market fit?
jack9 11y ago
This was insightful. Google Car - classic example. Once you can prove you can do something, doesn't mean what you've done is something you can market and make a profit, etc. Regardless of the outcome (including failure) your MVP is where your process took you and it ended (with every stakeholder happy or everyone agreeing to stop).
robbles 11y ago
There's a lot of disagreement in this thread about the definition of MVP, and I think it stems from the interpretation of the "Viable" part. Based on the definitions by writers who helped popularise the term, like Steve Blank and Eric Ries, I think this word should be clarified as "viable for the purpose of the entrepreneur". Then the definitions of MVP as a process or marketing experiment make more sense. A MVP does not need to be viable for the customer (e.g. a complete, but minimal product) , just as an experiment.
brudgers 11y ago
Buying a lottery ticket and tweeting demands at Paul Graham are almost certainly feasible methods for obtaining several million dollars by the end of next week. However, neither method is viable because that's not the way things work: to a first approximation, lottery tickets lose and the evidence is that Paul Graham doesn't give millions of dollars to people he doesn't know when they tweet at him. Unfortunately, it's easy to conflate feasibility with viability because anything that is infeasible is also nonviable: e.g. buying a ticket for last weeks lottery or tweeting demands at Charles de Gaulle. Fortunately, the Brikman's article does not fall into this confusion. It's easier to determine what is feasible -- two app developers can build a restaurant app and put it in the app store -- than what is viable: build a restaurant app that people use. To be feasible, it only has to be technically possible for the developers to build an app. To be viable, it has to be useful enough that people use it. One might say that viability is checking feasibility against non-technical goals. If the reason for building the app is to make money, feasibility is based on projected prices, costs, and sales. Viability about assessing those projections. Brikman's position appears to be that a product is whatever can be put put in front of customers or potential customers. It's reasonably consistent with a world in which many things people tend to consider products are free or fundware. It's plausible. But I can see why someone might choke on that, so YMMV.
perseusprime11 11y ago
There is a big problem with the term MVP. It does not work uniformly in all markets, especially in mature markets when you are trying to substitute either your own product or competing with a very mature product of your competitor.

120 points by ctdean 11y ago

anjc 11y ago

Yeah I saw this on Reddit too. I'm not sure what the point of the article is. It references Ries in passing as if it's only vaguely relevant, and proceeds to say precisely what Ries said 10 years ago in the first few pages of probably the most prolific book in the startup community. It then tries to make the article more relevant by conflating Lean with Agile and suggesting that they're both only vaguely relevant, when the entire article is specifically talking about Lean concepts. (And I say all this as someone who hated The Lean Startup). ??

IanCal 11y ago

I thoroughly disagree with misusing terms like this. Experimentation and the like are important, but that doesn't mean you get to throw away the term "minimum viable product". This article is more about "how to find out what an MVP might be". > An MVP is not just a product with half of the features chopped out Right, it's supposed to be the absolute core of what is necessary. This requires actually knowing what your customers want. It's perfectly OK to say "I don't know what our MVP should be" and then go and try and find out what it should be. But until you have something that is actually viable as a product then you don't have a MVP. > You spend months figuring out how to launch custom mobile apps for your clients, only to find out that what a restaurant owner really wants is a mobile-optimized website that’s easy to find on Google. So you added an extra feature that's unwanted and failed to add a required feature. This is neither minimum, nor viable. > Or, after using all the latest technologies to build real-time chat, you find out that restaurant owners can barely deal with email and don’t want to sit at a computer all day. Adding an extra feature nobody needs means you've not built a minimum product. > Or, worst of all, you might find out that restaurant owners don’t want the hassle of dealing with technology and maintaining mobile apps and have no interest in using your product in the first place. Then you haven't built a viable product. > Therefore, the very first MVP could be a mockup of such a mobile app Not really, since this isn't a viable product. edit - I think this is a common issue, people taking terms and then bringing in what they "really mean". A "minimum viable product" is a very simple description. If what you have isn't a viable product, then I really do not understand the point of saying you've built a minimum viable product.

brikis98 11y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
- IanCal 11y ago
  > 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?

vezycash 11y ago

A more fitting title for the article could be, "Building your MVP the right way." The whole point of an MVP is to avoid spending time and other resources building stuff no one wants or the wrong solution to problems. Therefore the article is a cheat sheet to lean thinking. 1. Draw a mockup, Table of content, vision statement 2. Talk to the target customer as often as possible to clarify every aspect of what you're building 3. If you want to sell your product, nothing says you're on the right path better than paying customers 4. You shouldn't stop validating decisions after you've hit some success eg. Facebook and Google conduct hundreds of thousands of micro experiments on live users to determine button placements, colour choice, increase sign up rate... So in summary, don't drop the MVP mindset when you hit some level of success. Fail fast, and more importantly, fail often. Be a scientist.

mstolpm 11y ago

If something is called a "product", then its in search for users. If its called "process", then its the way to do something. The author exchanges the terms – but mixing both will get you nowhere while both are neccessary to succeed: You don't go from zero to MVP but have to develop a process to create a working MVP.

muxme 11y ago

I'm learning this with my website (http://muxme.com http://muxme.com), which is only a month old. I've pivoted about a hundred times, which makes me question what truth is, because literally every bit of copy, UX flow, and strategy has changed. Yesterday the site was personal, friendly, and quirky. Today the site attempts to create the illusion that we're multiple people operating a business. The one truth that is true and universal is that people can enter and win with no purchase necessary, which is what the website revolves around.

hobaak 11y ago

I give author credit how to break down MVP process easy enough to execute fast. Folks startup isn't academia. Please do not discuss purity of this article against lean.

Alex3917 11y ago

I have to agree with the other commenters, the logic is super muddled here. Building an MVP is a process, and determining when you have an MVP and can now launch is a process. But an MVP itself is emphatically a product.

applecore 11y ago

>The problem is that these teams do not understand the point of an MVP. [...] In fact, the MVP doesn’t have to be a product at all. By definition, a minimum viable product is always a product: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/08/minimum-viable-product-guide.html http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/08/minimum-viable-...

brikis98 11y ago
That article, and Eric Ries' book, define an MVP as a "version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort." A "version of a new product" doesn't have to be a product. The classic example of an MVP that Eric Ries uses is the explainer video Drew Houston created for DropBox before building the actual product [1]. The video worked as an MVP by helping Houston test his assumptions, but I don't think you could say the video itself was a "product." [1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/19/dropbox-minimal-viable-product/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/19/dropbox-minimal-viable-prod...

hywel 11y ago

This article is totally on-point. MVPs are the minimal viable test for confirming your hypotheses. While running a startup consultancy, the idea that MVP is a thing you make once before going on to make the 'real' product, was one of the two biggest misconceptions I saw. The other one was "lean means cheap". I ended up realising that most startup resources explain these crucial things with misleading terms and a confusing way. Really, the whole process should mirror the scientific method - I started teaching my clients based on that, telling them to forget what they'd already heard. I'm writing a book at the moment about this (working title: The Rational Startup) but that's a subject for another HN submission :)

goodJobWalrus 11y ago

The definition I found, and it works for me is: MVP is a tool to test an assumption: Ask: * What are you trying to learn with this particular MVP? * What data are you collecting about your experiment? * What determines success or failure of the experiment? I am not sure you can figure out in advance what is your riskiest assumption (like to OP suggests), it's more likely to be obvious in hindsight.

jaynate 11y ago

I agree with the sentiment wholeheartedly. MVP has been bastardized in most shops I have been in. What's actually built is a "minimally compliant product." We need a better name for the idea that we are searching for something valuable for customers to buy. How about Market Viable Product which is the anticipated end result of the process of searching for product/market fit?

jack9 11y ago

This was insightful. Google Car - classic example. Once you can prove you can do something, doesn't mean what you've done is something you can market and make a profit, etc. Regardless of the outcome (including failure) your MVP is where your process took you and it ended (with every stakeholder happy or everyone agreeing to stop).

robbles 11y ago

There's a lot of disagreement in this thread about the definition of MVP, and I think it stems from the interpretation of the "Viable" part. Based on the definitions by writers who helped popularise the term, like Steve Blank and Eric Ries, I think this word should be clarified as "viable for the purpose of the entrepreneur". Then the definitions of MVP as a process or marketing experiment make more sense. A MVP does not need to be viable for the customer (e.g. a complete, but minimal product) , just as an experiment.

brudgers 11y ago

Buying a lottery ticket and tweeting demands at Paul Graham are almost certainly feasible methods for obtaining several million dollars by the end of next week. However, neither method is viable because that's not the way things work: to a first approximation, lottery tickets lose and the evidence is that Paul Graham doesn't give millions of dollars to people he doesn't know when they tweet at him. Unfortunately, it's easy to conflate feasibility with viability because anything that is infeasible is also nonviable: e.g. buying a ticket for last weeks lottery or tweeting demands at Charles de Gaulle. Fortunately, the Brikman's article does not fall into this confusion. It's easier to determine what is feasible -- two app developers can build a restaurant app and put it in the app store -- than what is viable: build a restaurant app that people use. To be feasible, it only has to be technically possible for the developers to build an app. To be viable, it has to be useful enough that people use it. One might say that viability is checking feasibility against non-technical goals. If the reason for building the app is to make money, feasibility is based on projected prices, costs, and sales. Viability about assessing those projections. Brikman's position appears to be that a product is whatever can be put put in front of customers or potential customers. It's reasonably consistent with a world in which many things people tend to consider products are free or fundware. It's plausible. But I can see why someone might choke on that, so YMMV.

perseusprime11 11y ago

There is a big problem with the term MVP. It does not work uniformly in all markets, especially in mature markets when you are trying to substitute either your own product or competing with a very mature product of your competitor.