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6 min read Product Management

Minimum Viable Product

In this essay, I explain how a minimum viable product works and what the requirements are.

Why do startups need a minimum viable product (MVP)? How do we define the features for a MVP? What are the principles that we can use to move the team towards building that MVP which can be subjected to a lot of distractions in the market?

What is a minimum viable product?

The minimum viable product or MVP in short according to Eric Ries, author of “The Lean Startup” is the version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort. Notice that it’s not being (a) minimum only which you will create bad products that no one want to use or (b) just being viable where you require better resources like those in a multi-national corporations to build good high quality products that hope to roll out with maximum impact to the market out there. In a startup where you are straddled with limited resources, the need to focus on essential features in bringing the MVP to market is an important component.

Why do we need a minimum viable product?

Essentially most startups would fail. Hence understanding the reasons why they may fail allude to the notion of adopting the MVP development strategy. In a startup, we are dealing with two unknowns: (a) the product roadmap – “what is the final business objective of the product” and (b) customer discovery – “how do we know whether the customers really need this product to solve their pain point?”.

The allure of a good plan, a solid strategy and a thorough market research for a major corporation mapped to a startup is a perfect trap to the failure of a startup. It does not mean that you do not plan at all. It just means that you have to plan with two frames of reference: survival and long term. The first frame of reference is survival which pushes the entrepreneur to work with limited resources and build a product to attract a customer base for the company (and hopefully, the customers pay too). The survival mode requires short term thinking and forces the startup team to think within a timeline of 3-6 months. The second frame of reference is strategic long term thinking which takes the entrepreneur off the survival mode and imagine an ideal world of unlimited possibilities, i.e. how we can build this product to a final form that enjoys customer success and disrupt the entire industry. Startup failure usually culminated in either the entrepreneur too entrenched in a short term or long term thinking. The trick is to be able to switch between this two modes of thinking. Hence a minimum viable product means that you have to build a product with the least amount of features and achieve maximum customer impact. Minimum viable products require discipline. Do not mistaken that to be launching crappy or irrelevant customer products which some startups alluded to. The product must work flawlessly for the small set of features advertised and allowed the business team to collect enough customer data to validate whether the business can be scaled. For a good set of misconceptions about the MVP, this article should suffice.

Lack of focus and execution also constituted why some startups fail. Bad product managers usually displayed the following traits: (a) when they cannot sell a product to the customer, they blame the product for having less features, (b) they crammed too much features without developing a set of working hypotheses to test whether the customers would use the features. It is painful to work with bad product managers and I have my fair share learning the trade of building and shipping products at a rapid pace. Learn to say no to product managers who keep insisting that we need more features, because chances are, they don’t have a clue. A good product manager is able to map business requirements to a small set of features with the engineering team and willing to take the risk of being too accommodating to customers.

How do you decide features in a MVP?

To guide a product manager and his engineering team, here are seven simple and robust principles which I have adopted: