Skip to content

Launching With a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

What is it?

The book The Lean Startup by Eric Reis took the term MVP and re-defined an existing term in industry to mean:

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

Through this definition, an MVP helps us de-risk the launch of a new product and subsequent iterations by delivering a product with minimal/limited features that allows a team to test assumptions while reducing wasted effort.

Why do it?

Lean Startup borrows principles that date back to the Lean Manufacturing movement and encompass delivering quickly, eliminating waste, sharing knowledge, optimizing the entire system, prioritizing quality, and respecting others.

Find Value Quickly

The world is full of good ideas and problems to solve, but the majority of products are not successful. Failure is a welcome part of the development process, but only if your team understands why. Launching with an MVP helps teams fail fast and iterate on what they learned: find the simplest and cheapest way to test your hypothesis, get it in front of some people, and measure the impact. Rinse and repeat.

Validate Present State

Everything built should move the team closer to its stated goals, but simply having the intent to achieve outcomes will not automatically do so. Oftentimes users’ responses to using features in production can differ greatly from what they may have told you during an interview or prototype test, so it is important to confirm if you have succeeded versus assuming you have.

Inform the Future

Measuring the success of what the team builds is critical to helping decide what to focus on next. If you shipped a feature that is not meeting the intended outcome, the team needs to know whether to double down on that approach and build more features to achieve the outcome, or pivot to a different strategy.

Build Trust

Any time spent building software costs time and money, so having data to justify your decisions is essential to building trust among your users and stakeholders. Users will lose interest in your product if you continually ship them features that do not solve their pains or improve their experience, and stakeholders will stop funding and/or evangelizing your product if you are spending time and money building features but cannot demonstrate why. Especially in the DoD space where products do not have as much direct financial feedback from an open market, trust needs to remain high to avoid sudden funding cuts.

Who’s involved?

This is a full team practice but is primarily spearheaded by Product Managers and Designers.

When to do it?

Every time a new idea is born. This is an ongoing process and is only considered “finished” when the product or feature has obtained satisfactory metrics to achieve the desired outcome.

Multiple definitions of "MVP"

**A word of caution: the term “MVP” has become loaded, especially in the DoD space. We use it here to reference what it is meant to represent: the smallest thing you can possibly deliver that still adds value. Many DoD stakeholders have been known to camouflage lengthy requirements lists under the umbrella of an MVP. Understand your stakeholders and maybe consider using a different term - the meaning is what matters, not the acronym.