Whenever I am involved in discussions about minimum viable products one question that often arises is:
I will quickly try to address this question in this post. A good place to start is to recognise the main goal of building MVPs. We must always remember that our ultimate goal is to build products that people want. So our main job is to figure out what customers want. We need to learn this quickly, before wasting too many resources. Are we solving a problem that customers really have? Is our proposed solution something customer view as valuable? Will they pay the amount we assume for the product? Remember, there are many ideas that sound great on paper but fail because customers will not pay money for them, or even use them for free!
So once we are clear in our mind that the main thing is to learn about our customers, it becomes easy to decide how minimal the MVP should be. It is important to realise that the MVP is merely a tool for learning about our customers. It is not necessarily the final product. So, the decision about what to do with the MVP should be based on the specific hypothesis about customers that we are currently testing. Are we testing a problem hypothesis, are we testing whether customer will respond to our value proposition, are we testing pricing, or are we testing whether to add a new feature? Whatever the case may be, you need to design the minimum ‘product’ that will allow you to learn what you need to know about customers. Anything more is waste, and probably noise that adds confounding factors to your experiment.
What we refer to as MVP, scientists call operationalization. When a scientist develops hypotheses about any phenomenon in the world, the next task is to figure out the experimental design to physically test this hypothesis. These can be as simple as a pen and paper survey and as complex and expensive as the hadron collider. The choice of operationalization is entirely dependent on the research question at hand. So, how minimal should our MVP be?
How minimal should my MVP be?
I will quickly try to address this question in this post. A good place to start is to recognise the main goal of building MVPs. We must always remember that our ultimate goal is to build products that people want. So our main job is to figure out what customers want. We need to learn this quickly, before wasting too many resources. Are we solving a problem that customers really have? Is our proposed solution something customer view as valuable? Will they pay the amount we assume for the product? Remember, there are many ideas that sound great on paper but fail because customers will not pay money for them, or even use them for free!
So once we are clear in our mind that the main thing is to learn about our customers, it becomes easy to decide how minimal the MVP should be. It is important to realise that the MVP is merely a tool for learning about our customers. It is not necessarily the final product. So, the decision about what to do with the MVP should be based on the specific hypothesis about customers that we are currently testing. Are we testing a problem hypothesis, are we testing whether customer will respond to our value proposition, are we testing pricing, or are we testing whether to add a new feature? Whatever the case may be, you need to design the minimum ‘product’ that will allow you to learn what you need to know about customers. Anything more is waste, and probably noise that adds confounding factors to your experiment.
What we refer to as MVP, scientists call operationalization. When a scientist develops hypotheses about any phenomenon in the world, the next task is to figure out the experimental design to physically test this hypothesis. These can be as simple as a pen and paper survey and as complex and expensive as the hadron collider. The choice of operationalization is entirely dependent on the research question at hand. So, how minimal should our MVP be?
The MVP should as simple as is necessary to test specific hypotheses about customers.
Anything more is waste.
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