MVP – Why The Confusion To What It Means?
Rethinking MVP: Why “Minimum Viable Product” Is So Often Misunderstood
When I first started working in agile environments, the term MVP—Minimum Viable Product—kept popping up. To be honest, it always felt a bit off. Why not simply call it “version 1.0” or use the standard versioning scheme? I was told MVP meant “the least amount of work you need to do to sell and deliver to clients.” Being new to agile, I trusted the experience of those around me—they’d been doing this longer, so they must have known best.
But curiosity got the better of me. I dove into books, blogs, articles, and podcasts, and discovered something crucial: many people have the MVP concept completely wrong.
What MVP Really Means
A quick Google search brings up the textbook definition:
“A minimum viable product, or MVP, is a product with enough features to attract early-adopter customers and validate a product idea early in the product development cycle. In industries such as software, the MVP can help the product team receive user feedback as quickly as possible to iterate and improve the product.”
— ProductPlan.com
What’s even more interesting? MVP isn’t tied to Scrum or any specific agile framework—scrum.org doesn’t even mention it as a Scrum concept.
The real purpose of MVP is to test whether your product is on the right track—solving real problems, meeting actual needs, and gathering feedback to inform rapid iteration.
If you want to dig deeper, I highly recommend the book Sprint by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, and Braden Kowitz. They offer practical examples of MVPs and how companies have used them to build truly great products.
Why Is MVP So Often Misused?
So, why do so many teams and organizations get MVP wrong? Dean Peters calls it “Cargo-Cultism”—people mimic the words and rituals without understanding the underlying principles. The literal interpretation of “minimum” and “viable” makes it tempting to ship the bare minimum as quickly as possible, rather than using MVP as a learning tool.
Jeff Gothelf, in "Lean vs. Agile vs. Design Thinking," explores how the concept of MVP is often misused in the name of speed and superficial quality. This leads to a negative feedback loop:
- Teams rush out a product labelled “MVP,” just good enough to sell.
- Executives celebrate the quick release.
- Customer feedback comes in—often as support tickets or complaints, or worse, as silence when features go unused.
- Leadership pressures development to fix the “misses.”
- Teams scramble to make changes, stress levels rise, and blame begins to circulate.
- Another MVP is shipped, and the cycle repeats.
In this cycle, feedback is reactive and comes too late to ensure real value. Customer satisfaction drops, employee morale suffers, and the organization becomes stuck in a cycle of patching problems instead of developing meaningful solutions.
Getting MVP Right: Feedback, Iteration, and Real Value
The good news? When teams truly understand the spirit of MVP, it becomes a powerful tool for learning and delivering value. MVP isn’t about doing the bare minimum to get something out the door; it’s about building just enough to test your assumptions, gather meaningful feedback early, and use that insight to shape a product that genuinely solves customer problems.
When you use MVP the right way, you create a healthy, iterative cycle:
- Build
- Learn
- Adjust
- Deliver real value—faster and smarter
Are you curious if your team is using MVP to its full potential? Want to break out of the “just ship it” cycle and build products your customers actually love?
Book a call at jberriault@berriaultandassociates.com. Let’s make MVP a tool for innovation and growth—not just another buzzword.
"I help create ecosystems that become legacies.”
- Jeremy Berriault
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