What does MVP stand for?

[carolrmc]

What does MVP stand for?
I read MVP on this issue dwyl/phase-three#28 ... what does it mean?

[nelsonic]

@carolrmc great question we use the initialisation so often in dwyl that we don't even think about clarifying it anywhere ... and it would be a really good idea to do so!

a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is when you do the least possible work in order to test your idea/hypothesis/assumptions while measuring a specific set of "metrics" in order to learn what people actually want you to solve/build.

There's a reasonably good Wikipedia article: wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product

In product development, the minimum viable product (MVP) is a product with just enough features to gather validated learning about the product and its continued development. Gathering insights from an MVP is often less expensive than developing a product with more features, which increase costs and risk if the product fails, for example, due to incorrect assumptions. The term was coined and defined by Frank Robinson, and popularized by Steve Blank, and Eric Ries. It may also involve carrying out market analysis beforehand.

Building an "MVP" is a principle in Eric Ries' Book "The Lean Startup": theleanstartup.com/principles

We include a diagram of what the MVP process is on our [website]http://www.dwyl.io/#process):

Building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a process for avoiding the development of products that customers do not want. The idea is to rapidly build a minimum set of features that is enough to deploy the product and test key assumptions about customers’ interactions with the product.

Eric Ries notes that Zappos founder Nick Swinmurn started by testing the hypothesis that customers were willing to buy shoes online. Instead of building a website and a large database of footwear, Swinmurn approached local shoe stores, took pictures of their inventory, posted the pictures online, bought the shoes from the stores at full price, and sold them directly to customers if they purchased the shoe through his website. Swinmurn deduced that customer demand was present, and Zappos would eventually grow into a billion dollar business.

It differs from the conventional (slower / more expensive) approach of investing time and money to implement whole product before verifying whether customers want the product or not. MVP tests the actual usage scenario in contrast to conventional market research that relies on surveys or focus groups, which often provide misleading results.

[nelsonic]

Related to: dwyl/technical-glossary#44