MVP

What it means

An MVP is the smallest version of a product that already solves the customer’s problem enough for them to pay or at least use it regularly. It is not an unfinished version of the full product.

Its purpose is learning: the company finds out what customers actually need before spending the budget on features invented in a meeting and never used.

An MVP is often confused with a prototype or a wireframe. Those show what the product could look like and serve for discussion within the team or with the customer. An MVP runs with real users and real data, so it answers whether anyone actually wants and uses the thing, not merely whether the design looks good.

How it works in practice

On bespoke work it means picking the one process that hurts most and automating exactly that. The rest stays in spreadsheets for now and follows the roadmap.

The economics are tested on the MVP, not planned on paper. If unit economics fail at small scale, more scale will not fix them, only enlarge the loss.

For an MVP we advise the client to book its costs to a separate cost centre or job. When the test is over, one place then shows what the validation cost and what it brought, and the decision on the next budget is made on figures rather than on the mood of a meeting.

What to watch out for

Two extremes cost the same: shipping something that fails even on first use, and building for a year without anyone seeing it. An MVP must be usable, merely narrow.

Without a success criterion set in advance an MVP cannot be judged honestly, because any result can be read as encouraging after the fact. Before launch, write down which number, such as the conversion rate or the count of paying customers, means carry on and which means stop.