Commercial
MVP
Also called
- Minimum viable product
The original definition is about learning: what is the least you can build that tells you whether the central assumption holds. That framing makes the scope question answerable, because you can ask of any feature whether it changes the answer.
The common misuse is 'version one with the fun parts removed' — a full product scope, shipped incomplete, which tests nothing and disappoints everyone. It is the same amount of work as a real MVP plus a worse first impression.
The useful discipline: write down the assumption, write down what result would falsify it, then build only what is needed to produce that result.
The difference between the two definitions is typically three months and a six-figure budget, spent either learning something or shipping something nobody wanted.
Commonly misunderstood
What people get wrong
The claim
“An MVP means low quality.”
What is actually true
It means narrow scope. What you do build should work properly — a broken experience answers a question about your engineering, not about the market.
Where this comes up
Services where it matters
Related terms
Next step
Working through a mvp decision?
Tell us the situation. We will give you the tradeoffs as we see them, including when the answer is that you do not need what you are being sold.
No pitch deck. A 30-minute conversation about what you are trying to achieve.