A Minimal Viable Product needs to actually be viable
Everywhere you go people are talking about shipping MVPs. MVP this. MVP that.
Let’s not gold plate this everyone. Let’s just ship an MVP!
It’ll be quicker. We’ll be more agile. Let’s break stuff and see how the market reacts.
The fatal flaw in this line of thinking is that a lot of people apparently don’t understand what MVP stands for. MVP stands for minimal viable product. It’s right in the name — viable!
For far too many companies and product teams, a MVP means a Minimal Product. Viability will come in a future release, apparently.
You can’t iterate to viability.
You can interate from good to great. You can iterate to refine after you get more user feedback. You can iterate to continue to build out your product.
Why can’t you iterate to viability?
If you deliver a non-viable product initially, you’ll lose a lot of users. The market will come to accept that your product was dead on arrival and not worth anyone’s time. You’ll set the expectation in the market that your product is not viable.
The focus of MVPs has gotten perverted from being a lightweight foundation to build on into instead a rickety house with a failing foundation that is half built everywhere. If houses were built like this, the foundation would have been half poured and cracking, the toilets not hooked up to water, the sewer line half done, smoke detectors would be considered a nice to have in the future, and the house would never pass inspection.
Instead, houses are often delivered from home builders in an MVP state. Basements are usually not finished (but there is electricity and air ducts!). Builder grade fixtures and finishes abound. Houses often come with wall-to-wall carpeting, which is extremely fast and cheap to lay down, but that can also be easily replaced by a homeowner at a later date with more intricate flooring.
What are we even doing here if we aren’t building viable products that meet user needs? I don’t even think our industry has an issue half assing things — we are barely quarter assing things much of the time.
