
People Mean Two Different Things by “MVP” - kartickv
https://medium.com/@karti/people-mean-two-different-things-by-mvp-51a75d1c77da
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contrast
I think it’s a pointless bike shedding exercise to discuss which of your
shipping versions was the MVP. I note your mentor is from Google - rather
notorious for keeping things in beta long after it’s shipped to millions of
users, and killing off viable products because they measure success in
billions of users.

MVP is about optimising the risk of your investment of effort and money in a
new product. It’s not a lagging indicator given by external usage. It’s a
decision you make about readiness to launch.

Don’t waste time waiting for someone else to tell you that the third version
after launch was your MVP. Make the hard decisions about whether you need more
design work before launch. After launch, focus on feedback and product fit.
Don’t spend time asking “is our already shipping product MVP yet?”

(Of course at scale, there are decisions to be made about launching into new
markets, integration into other products, how much to spend on marketing,
lining up partnerships. All of which may in fact be determined by success to
date. But for the product you describe, these are very separate to the MVP
conversation you need to have)

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kartickv
Thanks for joining the discussion.

It's not about looking back at earlier versions that have shipped and trying
to classify them, nor is it about asking someone else. Rather, when there's a
disagreement as to whether we can launch what we have, with one side saying,
"It's fine to launch, it's an MVP after all" and the other side saying "No
it's not at MVP quality yet", take a step back and remember that both sides
may mean different things by MVP, as the post says.

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nicbou
To me, the MVP is the minimum demoable product. If it's running, solving a
problem and getting feedback, it's viable.

The idea is to get something out the door and iterating on that. That started
at 0.1.

