A Minimum Viable Product Is Not a Product, It’s a Process
I thoroughly disagree with misusing terms like this. Experimentation and the like are important, but that doesn&#x27;t mean you get to throw away the term &quot;minimum viable product&quot;.<p>This article is more about &quot;how to find out what an MVP might be&quot;.<p>&gt; An MVP is not just a product with half of the features chopped out<p>Right, it&#x27;s supposed to be the absolute core of what is necessary. This requires actually knowing what your customers <i>want</i>. It&#x27;s perfectly OK to say &quot;I don&#x27;t know what our MVP should be&quot; and then go and try and find out what it should be. But until you have something that is actually viable as a product then you don&#x27;t have a MVP.<p>&gt; You spend months figuring out how to launch custom mobile apps for your clients, only to find out that what a restaurant owner really wants is a mobile-optimized website that’s easy to find on Google.<p>So you added an extra feature that&#x27;s unwanted and failed to add a required feature. This is neither minimum, nor viable.<p>&gt; Or, after using all the latest technologies to build real-time chat, you find out that restaurant owners can barely deal with email and don’t want to sit at a computer all day.<p>Adding an extra feature nobody needs means you&#x27;ve not built a minimum product.<p>&gt; Or, worst of all, you might find out that restaurant owners don’t want the hassle of dealing with technology and maintaining mobile apps and have no interest in using your product in the first place.<p>Then you haven&#x27;t built a viable product.<p>&gt; Therefore, the very first MVP could be a mockup of such a mobile app<p>Not really, since this isn&#x27;t a viable product.<p>edit - I think this is a common issue, people taking terms and then bringing in what they &quot;really mean&quot;. A &quot;minimum viable product&quot; is a very simple description. If what you have isn&#x27;t a viable product, then I really do not understand the point of saying you&#x27;ve built a minimum viable product.