The Open Source Product Manager
Building Better MVPs with the Food Truck Test
3 questions to help ensure the MVPs you build are genuinely great.
The Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a concept central to how product managers test, learn and validate ideas. However, a week doesn’t go by without some new interpretation or definition of what an MVP is. This proliferation of often contradictory definitions has led us to a place where everything is an ‘MVP’ (or some derivative acronym), but very few stand up to scrutiny when assessed against the original intent of an MVP.
Instead of yet another (re)definition what an MVP actually is, I believe what we need is a framework to refocus our efforts back on the core purpose of our MVPs.
To that end, let me introduce the Food Truck Test.
The Food Truck Test
Food trucks, essentially small culinary enterprises on wheels, present a perfect model for MVPs. If you extract the characteristics which make them great MVPs, you get three questions which I call the Food Truck Test.
What is the core value you’re creating?
Does your approach deliver this in a minimum way?
