Exactly - the ambiguity related to what is 'viable' is what allows any first-run product to be called an MVP.
Nobody releasing a product into the wild is going to be 100% happy with every aspect of it - it is then labeled as a MVP.
On the flipside, throwing ideas against the wall to see what sticks may be far too "minimum" in a saturated market.
The viability is what drives the whole concept.
The problem is that "viable" confuses what the purpose of the launch is. The purpose of the initial launch is to experiment and test a market and idea, not necessarily to release something that is "viable" (in what sense?). If it's a test, let's call it a test. No need for it to have a confusing label like viable.
To me "minimum viable product" means a product that achieves a goal with the minimum amount of features. It doesn't necessarily have to test anything, but usually does. Maybe its not 'viable' in a market --> if you were using it to test its success in a market your test failed, but the minimum viable product still did something, and was thus viable.
Given that what I'm trying to learn from my tests is what's viable, it seems like a great word to me.
Re:MVP Doesn't Mean Anything
by austinhutch on Monday February 24, 2014 @04:50PM
(#7293639)
You made this point beautifully. Thank you.
It forces people to really struggle with their domain. What is viable? For whom? How do you pick that group? What's the minimum? Can you go lower than that? How about lower still? If you go too low, will you be getting data that tells you what the thing left out is? It's tricky.
Is that hard? Great. It should be. It took Lewis and Clark 18 months to do a trip I did in a few days. That my trip was fast and easy wasn't a sign they were doing it wrong. Exploration is necessarily hard and confusing. If it weren't, it wouldn't be exploration.