Don’t Forget the “V” in MVP

Minimum Viable Product, or MVP, is a common term used by business leaders and product owners to help drive quick, iterative, product development to get products released to market faster. The goal is to release just those core features necessary to put the product in front of customers to learn about customer needs and validate assumptions prior to larger investments in a new product. Release quickly, release often, and adjust the product based on feedback from customers.

Product teams today do a great job of focusing on the M, Minimal. Constantly asking the team and business stakeholders when new feature requests are made, "Is this a requirement for MVP?" helps prioritize development efforts and keep the team focused on making a timely and relevant release. Business stakeholders on a regular basis can see the features being developed during frequent demos and can provide direct feedback which goes back through the same intake process grounded by the same question focused on releasing the MVP. When the cycle is managed by a proactive Product Owner, it can be an extremely efficient way to get ideas from a napkin at lunch to a product in front of customers.

Where Product teams struggle is with making sure the V, Viable, is taken into consideration as a team. Security, operational readiness, reproducibility, and scalability are all important parts of any product which helps validate the viability of a product. Unfortunately in the race to production, these items fall by the wayside and show up on the backlog. When the team does release the product and receive customer feedback, they're often stuck in a challenging position of either picking up the items in the backlog tagged as After MVP or continuing to refine the product to keep customers engaged. As it should, the focus remains on the customer and meeting the business objectives for the product. The weight of the backlog eventually causes cracks in the team, cracks in the product, and a new round of questions for business stakeholders to consider regarding whether to refactor, rewrite, or sometimes, a new MVP to fix the problems from the previous MVP.

Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment, Security by Design, Test Driven Development, Performance Testing, Infrastructure as Code – these are all terms many development teams are familiar with and actively promote inside organizations today. However, many of these items are the first things added to the backlog during MVP development when teams are racing against the clock. We need to do a better job as Engineers communicating to business stakeholders that each of these items are individually, and collectively, an important part of making a product viable.

We can still meet the needs of a minimal product by constraining the conversation in each case to the product being developed. The product may not have a need to support a thousand requests a second for the MVP, but we should ensure performance testing frameworks are in place and exercise the product on a regular basis so issues can be discovered early and often during the development process. The product may only require a small amount of simple infrastructure to be deployed to support the MVP, but the infrastructure should be built and deployed in code alongside the rest of the product so as needs change the foundation is already in place to support rapid growth. The product may not have a requirement to support a security standard for the MVP, but the application should be built following a set of standard security practices and validated regularly with automated testing to support a growing customer base. 

Viable – the ability to work successfully and securely.

Product teams need to ensure when MVP is defined, the product's ability to work successfully after release is front and center during the development process. Minimal helps you get to the first release; Viable ensures you make it to the second.