Minimum Viable Product or Minimal Marketable Feature

So, how many of us understand these terms.   We are sure most of us have heard these terms but yet know nothing or very little about them.

Lets us explore these terms:

Minimum Viable Product or Minimal Market Feature are synonyms means the baseline of a product that contain enough features that it can showcased to the client as first raw cut.

It will have the basic skeleton of the business case that the product stakeholders are trying to solve.  The product itself will have the bare minimal feature working but it will be able still solve the main gist of the business problem.

Let us understand this with an example:

If we are making a website for a casino, the minimum viable product is the layout of the website, with its color scheme and style with maybe the landing page working.  

There is no need to show the entire working of the website.

The following definition of Minimum Viable product comes from the book by Mike Griffiths:

The term refers to this package of functionality that is complete enough to be useful to the users or the market, yet still small enough that it doesn’t represents the entire project.

Another example of MVP is cell phone basic.  You can use it call another person but nothing more.  It is product that is useful and provides solution the main business problem of being able to call a person when you are moving from one place to another.

The concept of Minimum Viable Product is very important to Agile , as Agile asks for continuous delivery and minimizing .  Hence an agile team usually concentrates on giving the Minimum Viable Product first as it both increases client satisfaction and minimizes any gold platting. Using this agile team minimizes the waste by developing only that much as is required by the customer.  It provides the team with basic learning about the business problem and validates the result. It is one of cheapest ways of gathering insight about the product, and can help the team and business to understand the product and whether it is feasible and sellable in the market.

It is important to know that Minimal Marketable Feature is used so that the team can do a quick and early delivery and get all the changes that are required for the project from the client so that there is no wastage of resources. It helps in reducing wasted engineering/development hours. It can help us in deep understanding of the product and what will the end user think about it.

Minimal Viable Product is like Proof of Concept or prototyping in Waterfall model yet very different.  Unlike a POC or a prototype in which the output gets discarded at the time the development starts, the MVP will be fully functional for the baseline features selected by the team.  The team will build on top of by adding new features to it.

This concept can be used anywhere and will always help you to streamline your product to suit client needs.

About Sparsh Goyal

A passionate IT professional, Sparsh Goyal boasts of 4.3+ years of experience. He has worked for various projects under AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Spring Boot, Python, Microservices, RESTful, RESTFUL APIs/SOAP, Scripting, Shell and JAVA. He is also working towards gaining proficiency in Oracle Cloud PaaS, DevOps, SaaS and Docker/Kubernetes. His primary and secondary skills validate his relentless pursuits of expanding his horizon and developing more as an IT person. He boasts of the following certifications: *Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer. *AWS Cloud Solutions Architect Associate. *Oracle certified JAVA programmer.

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