It is just M-V-P. <period>
Oftentimes, in my interactions with product managers and project managers alike, I hear the following:
- Let’s define our MVPs. What is going to be MVP1, MVP2, MVP3…?
- We have finished our MVP1. Before we do our MVP2, let us communicate to the world (Read: Internal Stakeholders) about our MVP1.
- So on and so forth about MVP1, MVP2… MVPn.
My questions to all of them:
“So, if you are just defining and versioning your MVPs, what is your product and when will you launch it?”
“When will you call your product a product, and stop calling it a list of MVPs?”
“Are you all so insecure about your body of work that you want to be in constant MVP state?”
This, I believe, is a result of Agile-Porn that has spread like a disease. Don’t get me wrong here — I am all for Agile; I love the flexibility and the freedom it provides to businesses. I just squirm if and when these processes take precedence over people.
Aside from my rant above, let me take you through the process of building products. There are three types of products that product managers usually build:
- A brand new product that the market has never seen or experienced.
- A fast-follow of a competitor as the product manager has a clear knowledge of the market gap
- A redo of an existing product based on new knowledge that the product manager has gained from the market data.
Allow me to indulge you a little further on the above three:
New Product
This is a scary thought for any product manager — Building a new product, without any precedent. However, this is the most exciting part of a product manager’s career. Typically, a product manager, by keeping her eyes and ears open, observes market dynamics, customer usability, and an opportunity to bridge the market gap. The key to understanding what exactly fits the market is in doing “an” MVP-approach to validate her ideas and assumptions. She quickly puts together a product, for a select subset of her target customer segment to gather feedback and validate her idea. Most often, the products that we see in the market — new or otherwise is NOT MVP, because they have already been released to thousands of people across the internet. It is “the” product. Any new additions to the product in terms of features or capabilities are called “iterations” of the product. This is called an “MMP — Minimum Marketable Product”.
Fast Follow the competitor
In this scenario, a product manager can never go to the market with a product that has fewer features or is less usable than the incumbent in the market. So, the product manager assumes that the incumbent is the MVP and builds on it with her ideas about improving the product to fit the market. However, the key to success here is time to market so, whatever the product manager builds should always be MMP. Example — Facebook over MySpace, Google Search over AskJeevs/Altavista, etc.
Redoing an existing product
Typically, in large organizations or organizations going through digital transformations, product managers are often redoing their product portfolios for various reasons — changing the technology stack, scaling to a different market, gaining advanced knowledge about product usability, adhering to new compliance standards, etc. In such scenarios, there is often a need to redo the product from the ground up. Such re-platforms are NOT MVPs. Why?
These are already mature products in the market from your portfolio. You absolutely cannot go to the market with a feature-stripped MVP approach. These products should always be partiy+.
So, there is no question of an MVP approach here as you are already ripe with customer feedback.
However, if you are adding a major feature to your product, then you can choose to take an MVP approach. For example, you are looking at a new ML algorithm to understand the most optimal shipping option for a specific delivery or you are introducing a new payment method for transactions, then you, as a product manager, can decide if you want to do an MVP-approach.
So, in conclusion, MVP is a great way to validate ideas and correct calibrations. Please, for heaven’s sake don’t version your MVPs! And stop reading the Agile-Porn you are most accustomed to on the internet!
