What tremendous success you've had these past few years! You've been touring from project to project, been featured in books, and receive an annual award in American sports. No, wait, that last one is for your older cousin, the Most Valuable Player. Are you actually jealous of him? Him, the Most Valuable, and you, the Minimum Viable? Let's discuss this in person sometime.
Your success has its downsides, though. Suddenly you've become a buzzword, a discarded hype. People smile wearily when you're mentioned. "Oh, that's just an excuse not to do things," I often hear. Or you get bloated beyond recognition in projects: "We can't cut anything, we need all the features, otherwise it'll be a flop." Your very existence seems to be questioned. But why?
definition
You were created by Frank Robinson in 2001. Today he describes you as "(...) the sweet spot in the upper left quadrant of ROI on the vertical axis and risk, which correlates directly to effort and time to market, on the horizontal axis." With this definition, I suspect the following image speaks louder than a thousand words:
Image source: SyncDev
That's very business-oriented. But don't worry, he won't stay so technical. He also sees you as a kind of mindset:
“It says, think big for the long term but small for the short term. Think big enough that the first product is a sound launching pad for it and its next generation and the roadmap that follows, but not so small that you leave room for a competitor to get the jump on you.”
So you're perfectly suited. Big enough to change the world and leave the competition behind, but also small enough to continuously evolve.
Startup
This explains why you were adopted by The Lean Startup . Startups are always fighting for investor funding and need to prove as quickly as possible that their business model works in the market. The business model is the hypothesis from which you are developed with minimal risk and effort to test it in the market. If it's successful, it will be nurtured and further developed. If not, the startup has to discard parts or even the entire hypothesis and pivot. I've tried to visualize this for you with the following sketch:
This is no easy lot to live with. If you want to survive, you're doomed to succeed. It's immense pressure. But try to look at it from a different perspective. You're helping many people with limited financial resources to fulfill their dreams, potentially change the world, and create jobs.
breakthrough
Thanks to your successful tour of the small startup stages, the big, well-funded event organizers have now taken notice of you. They all want to build your products instead of huge ones cluttered with unused features.
Personally, I find this very welcome. But I also understand your doubts. You're too quickly labeled as "minimal" and not seen for what you are: a great product with great features that will be further developed if successful.
In search
You need to understand us. Finding you isn't easy. We have to work through some heated discussions to figure out which of the countless options are actually the great features. This can drive us to the brink of despair.
Fortunately, we have tools for this. We often find you when we visualize the Kano model, as in the following image, and assemble you from the basic functions, some performance features, and two or three exciting extras as the icing on the cake.
Or we can implement only the main scenario of a use case and not all alternatives. For example, we might first implement the uploading of a photo to the social media app of your choice and only later add the editing of the photos with various filters.
The story map helps us find you. To do this, we slice through your most important user task stories, creating a complete package covering the entire user journey.
See you soon
I could write much more about you, but I need to wrap things up. Before I do, I want to answer the question I posed at the beginning from my own personal perspective. Dear MVP, you absolutely have a right to exist. You help us have the right discussions and reflect on whether it really "everything" to be successful.
To me, you are a worthy grandson of your grandfather Vilfredo Pareto and the principle named after him: 80% of the results can be achieved with 20% of the total effort.
Stay as you are, and let yourself be shaped by the context and many fruitful ideas.
Your Beni
PS: Don't let your competition, the Minimum Awesome Product, the Minimum Viable Feature, the Minimum Marketable Product, and whatever else they're called, throw you off. I don't need them, because you can handle all those aspects yourself.
Sources:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_Viable_Product
https://productboard.com/glossary/minimum-viable-product-mvp/
Book: Don McGreal & Ralph Jocham: The professional product owner : leveraging scrum as a competitive advantage, Boston 2018.
