We’ve talked about the concept of a minimum viable product (MVP) a number of times at TeamCamp meetings. MVP seems to be a good fit for TeamCamp projects given that we’re generally working on projects in the evenings so we don’t have a lot of money or time to spend on developing services. Therefore, if you’re really excited about an idea, developing the absolutely minimum product is a great way to test the waters.
For those of you that would like to find out more about MVP, Eric Ries (@ericries) has uploaded a talk he gave at a #leanstartup presentation in San Francisco – see the end of the post for the embedded video – it’s pretty shaky but good all the same.
Recently we’ve gained some real experience at developing a minimum viable product (MVP) at TeamCamp. We tested out our latest idea, a Twitter based event management system, by using a wordpress page and manually monitoring Twitter for hastags. The result: people thought we had actually developed the product and were really excited about it. That gave the team the confidence to move ahead and develop mock-ups of our first event landing page and on our next iteration, 2 weeks later, we established a dedicated web page and started to automate the Twitter updates.
Some other things I picked up on from Eric’s presentation:
- Keep doing the MVP over and over again until you’ve hit the nail on the head (or fail quickly) – afterall pesistance is key to being an entrepreneur
- MVP is exactly one cycle through the feedback loop of Build => Measure => Learn
Some techniques:
- Smoke testing – Put up a landing page to find out if anyone wants the product, even at no cost
- SEM on $5 a day
- In-product split testing to try out new features, changes
- Paper prototypes
- Customer discovery/validation
- Removing features
Eric talks about the three fears poeple have with MVP:
- False negatives – Getting feeback that the MVP product sucked because it was too limited but users would have liked the full product
- Visionary complex – believing that customers don’t know what they want and then ignoring their feedback
- Too busy to learn – feeling that measuring distracts from delighting customers – “how can you afford to do MVP?”
Eric also talks about customer feedback of an MVP: any feedback is good, even if people don’t like it. It’s when you get no feedback that you need to be worried.
We still have a lot to learn about MVP. We need to be a lot more diligent on the Measuring and Learning part of the build cycle and I think we need to get the MVP out in front of more “customers” so that we know we’re working on the right things. But the key here is we’re learning a lot and enjoying ourselves.
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