The term minimum viable product (MVP) has achieved buzzword status in recent times and I’m now hearing people throwing around the term MVP almost on a daily basis. The issue is that it’s common for people to say MVP when they are actually talking about is a minimum business increment (MBI), a minimum marketable feature (MMF), or a minimum marketable release (MMR). Having said that, I prefer the terms MVP and MBI, two different concepts, and rarely use terms like MMF or MMR other than to point people to the first two terms. Having said that, I'll still cover all four concepts in detail here.
There are several reasons why there is significant confusion in the marketplace:
- These are closely related concepts with very similar names.
- Various authors over the years have used these terms in different ways, thereby muddying the waters.
- Terms naturally evolve over time, and will blur into each other, via natural usage.
To clear things up, we address the following topics:
1. Defining the Terminology
Figure 1 below overviews how the following terms relate to one another:
- Product. I'm using this term loosely to mean a product, a service, a combination of the two, or a new "big feature" of an existing product. I personally prefer the term offering, but product is the popular term.
- Minimum Viable Product (MVP). An MVP is an investment in learning, an experiment where your goal is to explore what a potential customer wants. To run this experiment you'll create a version of a product via the least effort possible so as to be used for validated learning about your potential customers. MVPs are experiments to explore a hypothesis about what your customers really want. They aren't to the “real” running version of your end product because they aren't at the level of quality or scale that you would produce for the end product. Having said that, I have seen MVPs evolve into a real product, or more accurately a real MBI, but more often than not they evolve into something more along the lines of a prototype (which is fine because they're an investment in learning and were never meant to be the real thing). A team typically runs the experiment with a subset of your potential customers to test a new idea, to collect data about it, and thereby discover customers are actually interested in. Note that the term MVP was coined by Frank Robinson at SyncDev in 2001 and popularized by Eric Ries in his book Lean Startup in 2011.
- Minimum business increment (MBI). An MBI is the smallest piece of value that can be realized by a customer (internal or external) that is consistent with the strategy of your organization. An MBI adds value for your customers and leads to valuable feedback to the product team that the right functionality is being built and is being built in the right way. An MBI is a solution that contains all of the pieces that are required for value realization by customers. An MBI, when it is done right, is both an MMF and an MMR. Note that the term MBI was coined by Al Shalloway.
- Minimum Marketable Feature (MMF). An MMF is the smallest piece of functionality that can be delivered that has value to its customers, and thereby value to your organization. An MMF is a part of an MMR. The term MMF was first proposed by Denne and Cleland-Huang.
- Minimum Marketable Release (MMR). Successful products are deployed incrementally into the marketplace over time, each “major” deployment being referred to as a release. An MMR is the release of a product that has the smallest possible feature set that addresses the current new needs of your customers. MMRs are used to reduce the time-to-market between releases by reducing the coherent feature set of each release to the smallest increment that offers new value to customers. An MMR is one or more MBIs (ideally it is one).
Figure 1. The relationship between MVP, MBI, MMR, and MMF.
2. Answering Common Questions
We often get asked several common questions around this topic:
- What are the key take-away points?
- Is it minimum or minimal?
- Why differentiate between MBI and MMR?
- Don't we just need the concepts of MVP and MBI?
What are the Key Take-Away Points?
The key take-away points of this article are:
- An MVP is an investment in learning.
- An MBI is an investment in value.
- Don't worry so much about the other terms
Is it Minimum or Minimal?
Given that I’m being picky about terminology, I realized that there isn’t agreement as to whether we should use the term MINIMUM viable product or MINIMAL viable product (and similarly for MBI, MMR, and MMF). Once again, the words are very close:
- Minimum. The refers to the least quantity or lowest possible amount.
- Minimal. This refers to barely adequate or sufficient (similar to the agile concept of just barely good enough (JBGE)). Minimal is an adjective derived from the word minimum.
As you can see, very nuanced. For better or worse, the industry has settled on the term minimum so that's what we're sticking with.
Why Differentiate Between MBI and MMR?
We wish we didn't have to. Ideally an MMR is a single MBI - your team wants to do just enough work to develop the minimum functionality that provides your customers with value and release it as quickly as you can. That's an MBI. Practically though you're sometimes forced to release more than a single MBI in a release. Perhaps you've decided to have a regular quarterly release cadence. Perhaps your customers prefer large releases (this still occurs in practice, although is becoming less common as your customers become more savvy with regards to incremental releases). These challenges can all be addressed in time, and they should be, but you may not be there yet.
Don't We Just Need The Concepts of MVP and MBI?
That's correct. When you've streamlined your way of working (WoW) you should be at the point where an MBI is an MMF that you release to your customers, so it is also an MMR. The concepts of MMF and MMR are stepping stones towards what you are really aiming for, MBIs. But you might not be there yet, and you may be working with people who are more familiar with older terminology such as MMF and MMR - as a result we recognize in DA that these older terms exist but we avoid them where we can.
3. An Example
Now let’s work through an example of the development of a fictional product using the concept of MVPs and MBIs. One day while shopping in the local mall my phone ran out of power. This proved to be a problem for me because I had a conference call that I had to be on, forcing me to cut my shopping trip short to go home and take the call there. This experience made me realize that there’s a potentially untapped market need as I would have been very willing to pay to charge my phone while at the mall. Note: I am fully aware that products such as Safecharge and Brightbox exist, but let’s pretend they don’t for the sake of this example.
Just because I’m willing to pay for this doesn’t mean that others will. To determine whether this could be a profitable endeavour I decide to follow Disciplined Agile’s Exploratory Lifecycle (see Figure 2), which is based on Lean Startup’s hypothesis-driven approach. My plan is to iteratively run a series of experiments to explore this product idea.
Figure 2. The Exploratory Lifecycle.
Over a several week period I work through a series of minimum viable products (MVPs):
- Experiment #1: A power bar on a table. I start with a very simple approach: I talk the mall manager into allowing me to put a table against a wall for a one week period to run an experiment. I plug a power bar into a nearby outlet and put it on the table. On the wall I have a sign that indicates this is a phone charging station. Throughout the week I stand by the table telling people about the service and tell them I’ll keep an eye on their phone if they want to go shopping while it charges (I quickly discovered that nobody is willing to actually do that, or at least they’re not willing to trust me, hmmm….). For anyone willing, I have them take a short survey asking them what they think about the service.
- Experiment #2: I add several common power cords. On the first day several people indicated that they would use the service but unfortunately didn’t have their charging cable with them. So at the end of the first day I bought several power cables from an electronics store in the mall. Sure enough, over the next few days I had more people willing to charge their phones at my table. By the end of the week I had gathered a fair bit of data that showed there was general interest in the idea but that a major problem was the inability to safely leave a device to charge while they go off to shop.
- Experiment #3: I move to a cafe. The following week I run a similar experiment in a cafe a few blocks away from where I live. Interestingly, I have several people ask to borrow a power cable from me so that they could power their phone while sitting at their own table. The cafe already has power sockets for people to charge devices and it’s fairly common for people to camp out in the cafe for several hours with a laptop or table plugged into the wall. After several days it becomes clear to me that a cafe isn’t a good option for a charging station.
- MVP #4: I add lockable cubby holes. Over the next week I decide to build out a more sophisticated solution, a wood cabinet that has 16 cubby holes for charging devices. Each cubbyhole has a specific type of charge cable, so if you want to change a phone you need to use a cubby with the right type of cable. Each cubby has a door with a physical key lock. I go back to the mall, in the same location as I’d been in previously, and instead of a survey I interview people to discover what they they think, how they would make it better, and what they’d be willing to pay for such a service.
This series of experiments led me to identify a collection of features that this product should offer:
- Lockable cubby holes. People will only leave their phones and other devices if they’re safe. Each cubby hole needs to be locked in such a way that only the person who left their phone in the cubby can get access to it. This could be an electronic locks where people can type in a private code or a physical key-based system.
- Common phone power cords. We need to be able to support charging a range of devices. Each cubby should have several common power cord/cables as well as a normal power plug.
- Easily accessible location that doesn’t offer charging alternatives. Malls and restaurants are good options, but public areas that already support device charging (like cafes) are not.
- Payment processing. We want to support credit card and possibly blue-tooth payment strategies such as Apple Pay. Payment options need to be investigated still.
Over the next two months we built a minimum business increment (MBI). The MBI was a large box which had 16 cubby holes for small devices such as phones. We the each box from folded sheet metal with clear, thick plastic doors so that people can see their devices. For security and payment processing we built a device that used a small touch screen (it was a tablet) as an input device attached to a card swipe for capturing both credit and debit card payments. Over several weeks we built five of them, placing three boxes in the mall where we had run our initial experiments and two boxes in another smaller mall on the other side of the city.
Then we continued to evolve the product via a series of MVPs. We ran some experiments in a public library where we discovered that library patrons wanted to charge large devices such as tablets and laptops as well as smaller devices. So we developed a new MBI, a “Library Charging Station” that had eight small device cubbies and six large device cubbies. We also hired a designer to develop a sleeker looking box when one mall management chain told us that they loved the concept but wouldn’t allow our boxes into their more upscale locations until they were more attractive.
4. Summary
I'll say it again (a paraphrasing of Al Shalloway's advice):
- An MVP is an investment in learning.
- An MBI is an investment in value.
Here's the key difference between the two: With an MVP you are in entrepreneurial mode and need to discover what your customers actually want. MBIs are for when you have an existing product and have a good idea for how to extend it.
My hope is that this article has helped to clear up some of this confusion.
5. Related Resources
- Minimum business increments (MBIs)
- The most compelling reasons for using MBIs
- The Exploratory (Lean Startup) Lifecycle
- The Release Management process blade
- The Product Management process blade
- Minimum vs. Minimal
