Minimum Viable Product is now mainstream. But what exactly does it mean?

In my opinion, MVP is just an example of a more generic principle: Fail Fast. In other words, if you have to fail, it is better to fail in the very beginning, reducing the amount of burned investment.

If my idea is good, using MVP is counterproductive: some early adopters will get bad first impression due to lack of some advanced features or overall unpolishness, and we will need to spend much more money later just to make them to give us another chance.

If my idea is bad, MVP will save us a lot of money.

Because there is no sure way to know if my idea good or bad beforehand, it is safer to assume it is bad and go with the MVP.

But how exactly minimal the product should be? Do we want to reduce the feature set? Or don’t care about usability? Or save on proper UX and design? Does it mean it may be slow, unresponsive, unstable? Can its source code be undocumented and unmaintainable?

Well, the reason of MVP is reducing the overall investment. The principle behind it, is investing just that much to achieve a sound and valid market test, and not more. This means, when deciding about MVP, you tend to cut the area what costs you most.

For example, let’s assume we have a product development team that needs only 1 day to design a screen, 3 days to develop the backend for that screen, and 10 days to develop the frontend. It is naturally, that MVPs produced by this team would tend to have great visuals combined with an awful and buggy UI and a very good backend.

Let’s assume now that a team needs a week to design one screen, 1 day to develop the frontend, and 5 days to develop the backend. MVPs of that team would tend to have ugly, but responsive and user-friendly UI that would often need to show the loading animation because of a sluggish backend.

What does it mean?

This means that a double advantage is given to teams capable of designing and fully developing one screen per day: not only their MVP will be released sooner (or alternatively can have more features, better look and performance and more user-friendly UI), but also it can be a well-balanced and therefore mature-looking product (that’s an advantage to be mature-looking).

And this also means, if you want to identify where your business has capacity issues, just look at your typical MVPs: if some areas of them are substantially worse than other, you know what areas of the product team can be improved.