What is MVP?
The term Minimum Viable Product was first introduced by Eric Ries in his book “The Lean Startup Framework”. MVP 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.
- In an MVP experiment, you build the smallest version of a product, with the least amount of resources, in order to get a real feedback and find out if your idea will work.
- Validated learning is learning from a scientific experiment from a scientific experiment where you are not biasing your customers.
- FAIL FAST: run as many experiments as you can in order to collect more data and find the best version for your product.
THE 7 STEPS OF THE MVP PROCESS
The process that a product manager will go through in order to run the MVP experiment has seven steps:
- Figuring out what your problem/solution set is.
- Identifying your assumptions and find the riskiest.
- Building testable hypotheses around your assumptions.
- Establishing your minimum criteria for success.
- Picking what type of MVP you are going to run and your
strategy. - Executing the MVP experiment.
- Evaluating and learning from the experiment.