Product MVP isn’t about product, it’s about strategy (and it may not be quick and easy to test)

This is article 1 of 8 in the Pivot Strategy Series. Hectic launched our web app in Feb 2021 and released an updated design in fall 2021. This series explores the research and decisions that influenced our updated design and strategy.

I’ve heard people talk about lean startup principles for years. It’s solid advice, to build a minimum viable product (MVP) as quickly and cheaply as possible to test your hypothesis, to get some kind of feedback and use that feedback to shape the direction of your venture.

I know this distinction seems simple, but I recently learned that the goal of the MVP is to test your strategy and not your product or service. The goal of an MVP is to find the right strategy behind a product, the right philosophy to order design decisions and shape a brand’s voice. It’s not enough to see adoption of your MVP, you also need to know what it is about the MVP that resonates with people and what key ideas from the MVP you should expand into the full product.

A simple distinction, but where it shines is when you are in a market where you already know that people want a product, but you believe you can make a better product by changing the underlying philosophy the product is built on. That was true of Hectic App, an all-in-one business management platform for freelancers, independent creatives, and entrepreneurs. It’s a market of millions and there are hundreds of tools to help them do business, so how do we test an MVP for a new strategy in this big and crowded market?

We built the app. We spent a full year building a robust platform made of 8 features that could have each been their own apps (things like project management, time tracking, and invoicing). So how is that an MVP? We spent a year building it, so how is it an MVP and not a final product? It’s because we designed and built it with a philosophy that kept the product simple and focused on the needs of a one-person business. We didn’t build a product, we built a test case for a strategy.

And here is the key to all of this understanding and the point of the whole article: by building an MVP, we learned what kind of robust product people really wanted. They gave us feedback about what they liked, didn’t like, and wanted to see in the future. This didn’t just populate a product backlog, it shaped our entire company’s strategy, our marketing and branding focus, where to invest time and money in product, and how to show value to future investors who wanted to see that we have a distinct vision in a crowded marketplace.

If you want to see what the feedback was and how it shaped our company, check out the next article in my product pivot series: How one piece of feedback shaped our company’s strategy for the next two years.

Photo by Donald Giannatti on Unsplash