Why the Concepts Involved in Creating MVPs Are Insufficient at Scale

 

By scale, I don't mean large companies, I mean projects that require multiple teams. The Lean Startup’s MVP is an incredibly useful concept that teams use to do discovery, implementation and delivery in the creation of new products. These teams focus more on learning than development - quick feedback and pivoting is essential. It requires operating at their own pace.

But most organizations need to first unjam their teams by getting them to work together. MVPs provide little guidance here. Different methods are required to solve these two different problems.

Organizations should also be striving to create dedicated product teams that are fairly autonomous from other teams. Again, the concept of the MVP provides little guidance. Existing products require more parts of the organization to be involved (e.g., marketing, documentation, support). These dependencies should be identified early so everyone is prepared when work comes their way. Focusing on MVPs is a start small go big approach whereas most enhancements start big (initiatives) and go small (next increment of value).

The concepts in the MVP are useful. But how to implement them depends upon the context in which they are used.