MVP is on the urge of extinction!

Why has Minimum Viable Product been transformed to Final Product?

Bruno Patriota
Jul 20, 2017 · 3 min read

The world of Product and Agile needs your help! Have you stopped to think about how you are building Minimum Viable Product? Now, this next question might spark some truth. Have you built an MVP and never iterated? Where along the lines did MVP turn into if it’s working, then we’re done, finished product!

Henrik Kniberg has a beautiful example that speaks volume on the concept of MVP.

When I talk to Product Owners about MVP most go back to the example above. So, where along the lines did we fall back to old ways of waterfall practices and coming up with a Big Bang Approach? Why do we keep saying, let’s build an MVP, but turn around and build the feature or product all at once?

When I think of MVP I go back to the Wright Brothers. I’ve learned a lot about these two from one of my favourite books, Mastery by Robert Greene. They have discovered and understood the true concept of MVP. If you aren’t familiar, The Wright Brothers were the first people to build and fly a plane in recorded history. Oddly enough, this plane is very different then the one you are thinking of right now.

The remarkable bit is how the two brothers that ran a bicycle shop have beaten the highest potential Scientists with a bank full of money from investors. The brothers knew their money was limited and they had to be precise on what to build. They’d learned from the previous Scientist who have failed at Big Bang approach and lost all used up all the money.

Without diving into a huge detail explaining how they came to such a phenomenal moment of history, the Wright brothers did an excellent job in prototyping and getting feedback as fast as possible to what worked and what didn’t work. It was this constant feedback loop that pushed them forward and made them the first to succeed.

Now, I think that building an MVP for an end consumer feels easy. Especially because you can learn a lot from others before you. But what about when you are building a service? When there is no direct end user at the time of build. This is a hot topic right now in the UX world, Service Design. What does MVP look like here and how can you do it properly?

My girlfriend has been having lots of conversations and getting a lot of sarcasm from me about MVP. She’s shared with me a wonderful Blog post by Ben Ralph, UX Research: Stop the Objections!
After you finish reading this, I’d recommend to go check it out.
https://blog.prototypr.io/ux-research-stop-the-objections-8db01420a586

Right, back to building a proper MVP. This is the challenge I’ve come across recently. I’ve tackled it by not calling it MVP, instead adopting the terms Alpha, Beta, Charlie as a means versioning. I felt this had a massive impact on how people looked at the product. The focus went from building the end product, to building a playground to experiment and discover. This is why I am talking to you about MVP and asking myself, have we changed its meaning? Have we just been tied so much into the processes that we stopped asking the Why and have now just accepted this new definition of MVP subconsciously?

I’ll end it with a quote below from Reid Hoffman, Founder of Linkedin

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Bruno Patriota

Written by

Product Owner with a passion for all things Product, psychology, kitties, puppies, Unicorns and Dragons! Find me @DigdaProduct

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