What Is a Minimum Viable Product?

A minimum viable product (MVP) is a version of your product that may not be fully complete, but it is functional enough for users to test and provide feedback. Its purpose is to determine if your idea has a market and if it effectively solves your customers' problems. An MVP is a crucial starting point for Agile projects, emphasising continuous feedback and iterative improvement by adding new features and refining existing ones to an existing product. 

Developing an MVP helps you bring something to market faster, reach out to early adopters for feedback, and design your product around the target market's needs. In turn, it can help eliminate waste by leaning into ideas that resonate with early users and abandoning ideas that won’t work. 

One example of a minimum viable product is the origin story of the retail giant Amazon, which Jeff Bezos founded in 1994 out of his rented garage. Bezos created a beta version of the website, which sold only books, and asked 300 friends and colleagues to test the site. After receiving positive feedback, he launched the site in 46 countries with zero marketing spending. Over time, he used his earned profit to expand his operations to sell multiple products and services, growing into a multi-billion dollar company. 

How to define your minimum viable product 

1. Research your customer. Create personas for your target audience. This will help you focus on what problems one person might have to gain insight into potential solutions.

2. Think about how your product solves their problems. Using your customer personas, consider their pain points and determine how your product meets their needs. 

3. Make a needs list and a wish list. You may have ideas for extra features when determining the most basic solution. Note them, but include only the features customers need in the MVP. 

4. Map task flow. Create a visual list of steps the customer will need to take to use your product. This list helps ensure you include every required task and account for every piece. 

5. Release and gather feedback. Release your product to early adopters. This release differs from launching your product. It is an experiment to see how people react to your MVP. 

6. Repeat. In an Agile framework, you repeat the cycle by improving your MVP based on user feedback and continuing through the steps. 

Related terms

• Agile

• Continuous improvement

• Product management

• Scope creep

Build your next MVP with Google

A minimum viable product is a critical part of the product development process and is integral for testing your idea quickly and efficiently. It allows you to gather valuable feedback from early users to help you iterate and improve your product.

Learn more about MVPs and the Agile project management framework from industry experts at Google with the Google Project Management: Professional Certificate on Coursera. Build job-ready skills like strategic thinking, change management, project management, stakeholder management, task estimation, and more at your own pace.