Eric Ries popularized the concept of the minimum viable product, often referred to as MVP, in his 2011 book The Lean Startup. In listening to a recent conversation with him on Lenny’s Podcast, Ries noted that the concept of the MVP has been heavily misconstrued over the years. 

It seems that many founders and entrepreneurs think of an MVP as a super low fidelity initial version of their product. However, this does not necessarily need to hold true. Yes, an MVP is a simplified, early version of a product, but its purpose is to test one or two key assumptions in a more time and cost-efficient way. Rather than building out the product with a fulsome feature set, the MVP allows for faster iteration and greater adaptability. 

The ideal MVP would therefore have just enough fidelity to where customers could use and derive value from the product and provide feedback on those specific assumptions. This process of developing MVP’s and obtaining feedback and iterating seeks to maximize resource efficiency and ultimately increase the probability of success in the form of product adoption. 

Determining this exact level of fidelity for an MVP is probably more of an exercise in estimation than precision, and it is also context or application-specific. For certain applications, customers will not be able to successfully use or accept a product without a higher level of fidelity. A healthcare application measuring and displaying sensitive personal health data would likely require higher MVP fidelity than an email marketing tool for example.  

Founders and entrepreneurs can be hesitant to ship versions of their product that are missing key features they’ve envisioned. The MVP process is a tactic to de-risk the most substantial assumptions, which forces prioritization to actually move quickly. 

In practice, many companies and teams do not take the time and effort to implement an MVP process. There are many ways in which to work, and utilizing an MVP process certainly does not guarantee a successful product. However, folks should keep in mind that not validating risky assumptions early on can lead to large amounts of wasted engineering (and other) work in the form of a well-built product that nobody really wants or doesn’t solve a meaningful problem. People demonstrating the willingness to purchase and use an MVP remains a highly useful method for validating that the team is progressing toward a product the market wants.