The MVP

Coined by Frank Robinson in 2001, and popularised by Eric Ries through his book Lean Startup, the MVP has become a pillar of high-performing product teams all over the world.  And yet, as a term, it's still commonly mis-understood and frequently misused.

So what is the MVP? Here’s Eric Ries’s definition:

"That version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort."

This definition makes clear that the MVP is not a product with the least possible functionality necessary for a public launch.  It has nothing to do with publicly releasing a product at all.  The MVP is however, the key to using the scientific method for building products.  It is purely a mechanism for validated learning, used to test hypotheses and discover what will meet customers’ needs.  The MVP is not about delivering value to customers.  If it does this but other learnings suggest that it needs to change, value may be taken away from customers...which leads to a predicament, upset them or keep supporting them and lose the ability to pivot.   Dropbox,  Facebook, Uber and many other large tech companies have all used an MVP, and referred to it as an MVP,  which is in line with Reis's definition.

Dan Olsen's 'Lean Product Playbook' proposed the term MVP Prototype to avoid confusion and semantic wars.

Alberto Savoia calls this set of tools, practices and tests a Pretotype.  Whilst largely reinventing existing ideas and pulling together well known practices, was partly an attempt to coin a new term to reduce confusion.

Tom Kerwin refers to them as Behavioural Probes because, as he puts it "Your success always depends on the behaviours of people and systems that are outside of your control."

The MMP

A slightly less common term, but one that is often what people mean, is the MMP, the Minimum Marketable Product.  Now, the term 'Marketable' may not seem entirely appropriate, but it is intended to clearly differentiate between something of launch quality (and arguably something worth marketing), and thus available to the public, from something that is not (or maybe not) of launch quality such as a true MVP.

Background

Robinson’s original definition defines an MVP as “…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. The MVP is determined by revenue-weighting major features across your most relevant customers, not aggregating all requests for all features from all customers.”

-  “MVP: How it Works” Oct-3-2008

The Evolution

Reis and others evolved the concept from Robinson following an abundance of findings on our industry, stripping back the MVP concept even further than Robinson's definition.  The most notable was the 2001, yes 2001... Chaos Report by The Standish Group that found that 80% of developed features were never used.

The problem with using Robinson's definition is that the MVP is bigger and therefore pushed further into the future, needing more time and larger investment decisions before complete.   With Reis's definition, there is still the ability to define this minimum usable product whilst enabling more learning and adapting between his MVP and the MUP.

See also: The Impossible Skyscraper