Product & Discovery

What is MVP?

Q: What is MVP?

MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is the minimum needed to validate (or invalidate) a business hypothesis with real users. The goal is not "to do little": it is to learn the most with the least effort. Popularized by Eric Ries in The Lean Startup, it is one of the central tools of modern discovery and product management.

MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is the minimum needed to validate (or invalidate) a business hypothesis with real users. The goal is not "to do little": it is to learn the most with the least effort. Popularized by Eric Ries in The Lean Startup, it is one of the central tools of modern discovery and product management.

In practice

A well-designed MVP starts from a clear hypothesis: "we believe X type of customer has Y problem and would pay to solve it with Z solution". The team then builds the smallest experiment capable of confirming or refuting that hypothesis — a landing page, a prototype, a manual pilot behind the scenes, a limited feature. Success criteria are defined before launch: what signal tells us to continue, pivot or stop. An MVP is not "an incomplete v1.0": it is a learning instrument. K21's CSPO course shows how to integrate MVPs into the discovery loop and the team's backlog.

What happens when it is missing

Without the MVP discipline, teams build the whole product before knowing if anyone wants it. Months of development end in a launch nobody uses, and the company discovers too late that the problem was different — or did not exist. The cost of the mistake is multiplied by ten: burned cash, demotivated team, market window lost.