What’s your minimum viable product?

I’ve always liked a challenge. As a child I wanted to be on the team with less players — the team most likely to lose, most likely to struggle in order to defy the odds. It was probably an early form of thrill-seeking, but when I set out in business in my early twenties, with no experience and no capital, this mentality proved dangerous.

With youthful arrogance in my sails, I would allow the scope of projects and goals to expand beyond what was realistically achievable. I couldn't be told anything and thought I could do everything. Regardless of what I put my mind to, (a website, a brochure, financial projections, an event) it had to be all-singing and all-dancing.

Of course, the realisation that the end product wasn’t that good, that business in general was tough, that the competition had equally big dreams, all served to demoralise — to the point where it continuously broke my momentum and slowed my progress.

This relentless pursuit of ‘the ideal’ is a state of mind that many entrepreneurs, freelancers, and creatives experience. When harnessed, and combined with determination, it is a powerful resource. When deployed in perpetuum, one can find that life moves on without them. We live in a world where providing value, communicating that value clearly, and building trust with ruthless speed, are hard currencies.

As a writer committed to delivering insight and originality, doing the hard miles is a crucial aspect of creating value. Even so, getting bogged down in perfectionism can undermine a crucial sense of achievement, and thus stifle routine and momentum.

So, having just attempted to breathe fresh life into a large and non trivial software project that flatlined in the past, I’ve been thinking about this frequently over the last few months.

An idea rooted in the startup community has resonated quite a bit — the minimum viable product — the notion of putting your work out into the open with only the minimum amount of features needed to make it viable, just enough to give it a fighting chance. Enough to learn — quickly. Nothing more, nothing less.

Testing assumptions without wasting time and money has to be better for everyone. After all, if those assumptions are correct and there are signs that people are interested in your work, things can be tweaked and polished along the way. At least there is evidence that the path is worth following.

The concept of a minimum viable product isn’t about breaking projects into smaller, more manageable parts. It is an approach that advocates learning as much as possible about your project and its chances of success for as little effort and resource as possible. In sitting down to create a list of ‘must haves’, a list of required features, and in seeking to halve that list by 50%, and maybe 50% again, it often becomes clear that there is a different kind of lesson to be learnt.

By implication, an ‘MVP’ flies in the face of ideas that cater for everyone by attempting to offer everything. It is a fabulous exercise in customer or user profiling. Only by understanding who you’re trying to serve, and why, can you arrive at a detailed spec for what’s needed.

Of course, putting bad work out into the ether on the basis that iteration will fix it in the future is counter productive. There will be no take-up, trust will not be earned and life will move on. The key word is ‘viable’; minimum might still mean a lot.

So, if you’re currently stuck, if you’ve jumped head first into something massive that now feels overwhelming, perhaps it’s worth reigning it in a little.

We might ask ourselves, what is the minimum set of achievements that would get things moving or get you to the next stage?

Forget the journey or the struggle for a moment, and focus exclusively on the single next step that will help you learn where you go next. It may not be where you expect.