MVPs are dead. Long live MVPs.
In the age of AI and flashy development tools, are MVPs still a thing?
I was at an event last week where a startup founder on the discussion panel said “MVPs are dead — that was a 2012 concept”.
Hmmm. Interesting.
Minimum Viable Product (MVP), as you already know, was a term popularized by Eric Reis in his 2011 book, The Lean Startup. The general idea is simple: before you go to the effort to build your full-fledged product, build a working prototype that you can get out into the market in order to learn from customers. That way your ultimate product development is informed by experience with actual customers.
Here’s the key sentence from the book: “A Minimum Viable Product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.”
Seems simple enough, yet there is endless confusion about what an MVP actually is. Many people still think the purpose is to show something, but the purpose is actually to learn something.
In fact, an effective MVP doesn’t have to be like the final product at all. Midi, the fast-growing telehealth provider for women, built a brick-and-mortar clinic in LA as their MVP to learn from, even though their ultimate vision was to build a fully-virtual care service. Back in 2008, Tesla launched the Roadster by buying cars from Lotus, putting electric motors in them, and branding them Tesla. A Palo Alto chef with a fusion-cuisine idea used a food truck as an MVP to learn about customer tastes before building the actual restaurant.
In all of these cases, the learnings the company got from an unconventional MVP were crucial to their eventual development of a successful product.
Meanwhile, at the event last week, I was still pondering what the panelist meant when she said “MVPs are dead” so I tracked her down later in the evening. She said “Well, ten years ago you could launch an ugly software application and call it your MVP, but today it has to actually look good and work well for anybody to use it”.
Ah! That, I completely agree with.
User expectations are high today, and modern tools make it relatively easy to create polished-looking software applications without much effort. But the fundamental purpose of an MVP — collecting validated learning about customers, is as essential as ever.
Here’s my final thought on this topic: You’re better off thinking of MVP as a process rather than a thing. You should always be thinking of how you test small aspects of your product on real customers before developing them into final form.
Because an MVP isn’t a one-and-done thing, it’s a never-ending process of always making sure that your product roadmap is always informed by validated learning from real customers.
This was adapted from my weekly missive for entrepreneurs, innovators, and investors.
