A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is an early version of a product that is designed to gather valuable feedback and insights to refine the final product offering. An MVP typically has just enough features to make the product usable, but not necessarily feature complete. MVPs help validate product ideas, test out hypotheses and understand user needs, before committing too much resources and money to fully develop the product.
MVPs are important because they enable product teams to efficiently allocate resources to the features that customers most value. Development costs can be minimized by building and testing the essential features first, and then supplementing them with more advanced features after the product meets customer approval. This approach can help to focus a product's development and leapfrog the competition.
MVPs are most common in the software and app space because those products can often be built quickly for a relatively low cost, but their use is not limited to digital products. Many businesses, from startups to well-established companies, have used MVPs. For example, Colgate-Palmolive used an MVP strategy when it launched a new line of toothpastes in which the activity of the fluorides and other active ingredients varied in order to provide different degrees of protection.
MVPs can be useful in gathering customer feedback and greatly reducing development costs. By releasing a product in stages, product teams can properly assess market response and refine the product without wasting resources on developing unessential features. This approach helps increase the chances of product success and is used by companies of all sizes to bring successful products to market.