Focusing on minimum viable products, or MVPs is a method for getting your ideas in front of customers quickly so that you can get feedback before you spend too much time refining them.
“Minimum viable” means you’re developing your product just enough so that people can use it, get a sense of how it works, and provide ideas for further improvement. It doesn’t have to look good, nor does it need to do everything you envision. It just needs to work well enough.
Imagine a developer spends eight months building a beautiful, fully-functional app, only to learn on release that it doesn’t do what their customers want it to. They’d have to go back to the drawing board with months of work wasted.
A better way is to spend a month building an MVP with a rudimentary interface and a basic feature set. They can release this quickly to a few customers to get feedback and then quickly iterate based on their comments, releasing again for further comments.
If the app is a bad idea, they’ve only lost a month and can move on to something else. If people like it, they can keep refining it. They may also discover development directions they wouldn’t have found on their own.
By the end of the same eight months, they’ll have a finished app that has already gone through several rounds of revisions, reflecting precisely what their customers want. MVPs focus innovation, increasing its efficiency dramatically.
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