Don’t start with the MVP
MVPs as originally envisioned are outdated, and it has no more place on a modern product culture.
The first mention of the initials “MVP” come from Frank Robinson in 2001. In that same year, the Agile Manifesto was born and the first Scrum real experiment in practice was less than 10 years old. MVPs are old.
It’s important to frame the time box in which the concept was created because it was addressing a very specific problem at the time: waterfall.
The market was still trying to forget the bitter taste that the .com bubble left on their mouth. A new approach to making tech products was desperately necessary. Product and Agile, for the longest time, gained ground not because they were good, but because they were not waterfall.
More than 20 years later, waterfall is dead as dead can be, but we are still talking about MVPs. Does that make sense?
What is an MVP?
Minimum Viable Product. You probably already know that, and you probably already know what it means, so I’ll be brief:
[…] The MVP is the right-sized product for your company and your customer. It is big enough to cause adoption, satisfaction, and sales, but not so big as to be bloated and risky. Technically, it is the product with maximum ROI divided by risk […] — Frank Robinson, SyncDev
You see, the MVP is the full product in itself. It’s not a testing tool, a prototype. It’s the first iteration of your product, the one you’ll build upon. It has to drive sales, it has to be likable by the userbase.
At the MVP stage, you should be pretty well aware of what is the core value of your product, what’s your audience, and what they are willing to pay for it. We are way deep into early adoption territory.
What about all the things that come before?
Modern product discovery
Although Robinson created the term, it was Eric Ries who popularized the concept in 2011 after the release of The Lean Startup (Ries would work with the concept since 2008, but wide adoption came after the book was released).
Ries definition of MVP was very similar to Robinsons, in a sense that you should “try out” the market before actually releasing anything. The key difference between the two was that Ries never mentioned money. His MVP’s key objective was to generate learning.
As you consider building your own minimum viable product, let this simple rule suffice: remove any feature, process, or effort that does not contribute directly to the learning you seek — Eric Ries, The Lean Startup
From there on, Product has become more and more about “what” to build instead of actually building it. What once started as a tool for learning, now is a discipline on itself defined as discovery: fake doors, prototyping, lean inception, value proposition canvas, continuous interview, opportunity tree… all of those are very cheap and very effective tools to accelerate learning.
As time went by, companies realized that the “maximum ROI divided by risk” was not starting with the MVP, it was starting with discovery. That doesn’t stop people from seeing MVPs as discovery tools, though. What is the problem with that?
Time to Market vs Product Market Fit
The most frequent critique made towards waterfall is its inability to get the Time to Market right. Since projects are sliced horizontally rather than vertically, when there is nothing else to be done, it’s not because the product is ready, it’s because no one cares to buy it anymore.
MVPs were originally conceived as a way to cut corners and reach Time to Market faster, delivering more customer requests as time went by, after they were already paying.
The problem is that Time to Market is a very “Project” concept, in a way that it defines an optimal, specific window in which value should be delivered. Not only this window is not static, but it is impossible to define how long it will stay open, or how many times it will open.
Enters Product Market Fit, transforming this window into a “state”. You don’t achieve Product Market Fit, you have it… and you might not have it anymore one day.
Take, for example, Snapchat. They had an amazing time to market, but they lost product market fit in the years that followed. Crazy as it seems, they regained product market fit after 2018 and they have been growing ever since.
An MVP would never be able to deal with this kind of situation. What should Snapchat do? Launch Snapchat 2 and see what the market was expecting differently from the last time? MVPs are a frame in time, a picture you take based on what you see now, it might very well be wrong in two weeks' time.
In a way, MVPs alone are like tiny projects. Instead of spending a lot of time and money as you would on waterfall, you spend less, but you are clueless all the same regarding the outcome of your work.
MVPs are not inherently wrong, on the contrary. When releasing the first version of your product, doing so with an MVP in mind is a very healthy product practice.
As time went by, though, the minimum viable product became less and less a thing on itself and more of an interchangeable concept to Alpha Release or V.1 release.
Modern discovery technics surpassed the MVP by a lot in terms of assertiveness and outcome predictability, but it’s undeniable that clarity comes only when you reach the market for the first time.
MVPs are not the starting point anymore, but they are still the best way to validate the core product concept you have.
- If you want to know more about discovery, I highly recommend Teresa Torres blog, Product Talk.
