Minimum viable product - MVP

The minimum viable product (or MVP) is a frequently used term in agile development yet it is often hard to grasp what it is.

The minimum part is easy, it has some basic functionality but a lot of bells and whistles can (and should) be missing. It will not be attracting huge amounts of customers or make the masses happy.

But it must be viable in the sense that is reasonable for a customer to use and does what it's expected to do. It must meet basic safety regulations and it must be a product that you can sell or present to real customers (this doesn't apply to a prototype). Some kind of packaging and manual might be expected and should be finished to a degree at least.


Even the first step in an MVP needs to be usable

Typically you want to use the MVP to learn more about how the product can be further enhanced to best fit customer needs maybe to learn which features are most valuable to add or if other variations should be designed.

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