What is an MVP?
By: Alina Jahani
Tags: Startup, Iteration, MVP, Agile, Waterfall

Ah, the old Minimum Viable Product (fun fact: MVP was first defined to 2 decades ago!). Product managers, engineers and designers love to use the word, but what does it actually mean?

Well, like any good definition, let’s start off with what isn’t — the waterfall methodology. Everyone knows what a waterfall is. It is a stream of water that flows downwards, sliding off of an edge with the assistance of gravity and physics. Now take that same idea, and apply it to software development.

Waterfall Methodology (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_model)

Looks like a solid methodology, right? One process flowing into the next like water. But let’s take a step back and think about the disadvantages of a waterfall.

The water can’t go back up the cliff easily, and therefore is unidirectional Whatever is in the water at the beginning will flow all the way down into the end. If a piece of garbage was thrown in at the top of the waterfall, it’s now in the end product at the bottom of the waterfall.

Now imagine that you have to drink this garbage infested water. There is no filter or purification system that stood between you and the water. Not even an aqua tablet. Would you want to buy this bottle of water? Knowing how it was made?

Hopefully not. So let’s add in a purification system and help filter out what should and shouldn’t be in the water, called Agile. This is an iterative process that aims to keep only what you need in the water by allowing people to sample the water through the refinement process. Okay, maybe that is disgusting in practicality but bear with me. This process will allow the right amount of materials to make it the final product.

How does iteration work? Well I think it’s best explained with this comic that shows how iteration should and should not work.

What an MVP is and what it isn’t (source: https://blog.crisp.se/2016/01/25/henrikkniberg/making-sense-of-mvp)

Each iteration should solve the pain point, while ignoring the bells and whistles the customer asked for. In the comic, the customer asked for a car. However, the underlying customer pain point is that they need transportation. Training yourself to think this way will be essential to delivering an awesome product.

Another way to think about pain points is when a customer goes into a hardware store and asks for a nail. While the customer service representative will give them a nail, the customer was actually asking for a hole in the wall.

Instead of waiting to give the customer a fully equipped car or giving them half built products like a single tire, the goal of an MVP is to solve the problem iteratively. That’s why the illustration finds cheaper, faster ways to solve the problem by providing a skateboard and other modes of transportation, instead of providing a fully equipped car right off the bat.

Another important point to note here is that you don’t need to get to the fifth step to reach customer satisfaction. While a car may have been the end goal, the customer may decide that the bicycle is less stressful than driving a car and is good for the environment. Your iteration cycle may start to morph into improving the bicycle. For example, your customer may say that riding the cycle at night is safety hazard as cars can’t see them. Your next iteration could be to include neon strips around the bicycle so that the rider can be seen.

If you’r interested in seeing how MVPs morph over time, check out my article — Delivering Product Value