MVP, MLP, MMP, MSP, MMF, MMR, Oh My!
You’ve probably heard of an “MVP” before, a minimally viable product. The problem, which you are probably also aware, is that that this is one of the most misunderstood concepts in software today. Then, just to make sure it’s extra confusing, the world has invented many other similar TLA’s (three letter acronyms) to describe adjacent or similar and related concepts.
MVP is a term coined by Eric Ries, author of the Lean Startup, inspired by much of the work of Steve Blank (author of Four Steps to the Epiphany). The original concept was intended to be the smallest amount of work you can do to learn from your customers what product to build to satisfy a need. Think paper prototypes and simple landing page strategies to validate customer interest. Instead, many of us (intending to build what our companies call an “MVP”) go off and build whole products and call them MVPs because they have the smallest number of features we think customers may need. If you do this, you are not doing it right. And if this is what you’re doing, I highly recommend you read Eric Ries’ book. You can likely validate assumptions directly with customers in a few hours with much simpler ideas than actually building anything with code. You should also read Henrik’s article related to the image above, it does a great job explaining the iterative learning cycle behind the MVP concept.
So what are all of these other acronyms? Scott Ambler has done a good job of describing some of them. With some simple Googling, you’ll realize there is definitely not consensus on how to define these terms. That said, I like Scott’s the best and I’ll paraphrase and add some commentary:
- MLP — I really only threw this acronym in because it made my blog title longer and funnier. I don’t recommend you use this one. It’s not even on Scott’s list that he describes. In fact, there are even two definitions out there for it, which makes it even more confusing. Minimal Lovable Product, which is much like an MVP, an experiment or a learning concept to validate customer need. Sam Altman, of Y Combinator, talks about focusing on the smallest feature set you can build that customers will love. It’s also called a Minimal Learning Product, which even though I like better because it’s more descriptive, has still not caught on.
- MMP — Minimal Marketable Product is the first full product that can be released to customers, usually a small feature-set targeted at your early adopters or beta customers. In the spirit of being agile, you are also expecting to learn a lot from this release as customers or end users start actually using your product to solve real problems and provide feedback. The MMR or Minimal Marketable Release is simply the very first release (of the many internal releases) that becomes marketable to customers. As Scott says in his post, these two terms are interchangeable.
- MSP — Minimal Saleable Product is, like it sounds, the product you’ve researched with customers and users to determine what type of product they would be willing to pay for. Presumably, this would include a moderate number of features that is more than the MMP and less than the full-featured robust product you’d eventually build.
- MMF — The Minimal Marketable Feature is the smallest piece of functionality that can be delivered that has value to both the organization delivering it and the people using it. Often, an MMF comes up because tiny product adjustments may not make the product more marketable, but as the aspects of a feature coalesces into something meaningful that can be described and marketed to customers, it makes more sense. The feature has intrinsic value on its own to customers and could be deployed by itself, and marketed in a way to attract new paying users.
So which acronym or concept should you be using today? My recommendation is that you find the right concept that applies, but be careful that you are using it in the right context. Please don’t call the early release of your product to customers an MVP; by definition and common sense using modern agile techniques, that is not minimal :) You can get way more minimal to validate concepts before you build anything. You might mean MMP, if it’s the first version you can publish to a subset of customers.
Whatever you choose, I encourage you to do the bare minimum to validate your concepts and the value you intend to bring to customers.
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Hi, I’m Brian Link, an Enterprise Agile Coach who loves his job helping people. I call myself and my company the “Practical Agilist” because I pride myself on helping others distill down the practices and frameworks of the agile universe into easy to understand and simple common sense. I offer fractional agile coaching services to help teams improve affordably. See more at FractionalAgileCoach.com
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