Minimum Viable Product

This is a heavily discussed topic among practitioners of Lean Startup principles. [by Eric Ries] Some would point at the classic concept of “early adopters” commonly found in the Information Technology industry; others steer you more to a series of techniques and tips.

Whichever way you ultimately decide, it's good to first define this the way Eric does:

The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.”

Notice Eric’s emphasis is primarily on obtaining early feedback from customers, with the least possible amount of resources and time to develop the MVP.

In our experience, this is not always feasible, especially when the product being developed is positioned in an already crowded, and highly competitive field. We found out firsthand that customers had little or no incentive to talk with us, let alone provide feedback on a product that did not even begin to fully meet their needs and requirements.

The biggest challenge for any startup or organization hoping to implement the MVP strategy is garnering early insight into the customer's idea of what the solution should be. For the technically inclined, this often results in patched-together code libraries in the favorite programming language platform.

It should be noted that the techniques espoused by other Lean Startup Practitioners included many routes that did not contain a single line of programming code! For example, customer surveys and split-testing from questionnaires were utilized.