What is a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)?

Minimum Viable Product or MVP has been adopted into common business talk.

MVP is a methodology created by Eric Ries in his “international bestselling sensation” book called The Lean Startup. In his book he advocated build-measure-learn approach to creating a new product or service.

Even though MVP is now commonly talked about but few businesses really understand the fundamental change that is required to make is work.

The shift requires you to forget about projects and embrace goals. If you forget projects then it frees you up to embracing change, this is a fundamental step for MVP to work. Change reflects reality where nothing ever remains the same and change is only accelerating, not slowing down. What MVP tells us is to accept change and stop trying to control it.

Change is here forever: accept it, want it and love it .

Once you accept change you will also accept MVP, because without change you cannot build with MVP, you cannot measure, or lean from you MVP. Change is how we improve how things get better.

Software has suffered from not accepting this and not building change into the way it is developed, at least not until agile DevOps or GitOps was introduced. Our Atlas Cloud suite of SaaS application is built from the ground up using MVP methodology from the start.

Do it once, Do it often – multiples time a day if needed, until you have a level of maturity that you and you team are happy with.