Pushing past the 45 degree fear of an MVP

Making Peace With MVPs

Be it a feature, functionality, prototype or full stack product, putting live a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is scary.

Since Frank Robinson, co-founder and president of SyncDev, coined the term MVP in 2001 and Eric Ries popularised it in The Lean Start Up in 2011, product people have been programmed to discover, build and put live their MVPs, from startups to the big 5.

MVP has adopted mis-understanding over time and translation, and product teams are often asked for ‘just an MVP’, ‘cause that is getting everything anyone wants quicker and cheaper right!?

And, therein lies the fear, the pressure to discover and build the most Minimum, most Viable Product, the solution that gives us 3 more questions:

• What is minimum?
• What is Viable?
• What is a Product?

“The best bit of an abseil is being past that tipping point, when you realise you are doing it, you didn’t die and you get to experience why you are doing this. As with anything scary, and anything product for that matter, pushing past that fear point is where you find the value.”

Katie Beaton, Head of Product @ Simple Online Healthcare

Having launched MVP B2C and B2B healthtech products, in both longer and shorter time periods than I would have liked, and MVP features, in forced response to regulations with strict dates.  When I was asked what to write for Product Speak, I knew I wanted to share my hard learnt MVP guidance.

So, have you ever abseiled down a mountain?

Pushing past the 45 degree fear of an MVP, is exactly that, the 45 degree tipping point, where it feels too risky, where you are afraid you are going to fall, dramatically to your death… (just me!?)

If you are at the point where you don’t know if you are ready to release an MVP, where to start or even if you know you are ready but you keep pushing back your go live date by another week, that fear comes from uncertainty.

What is an MVP, Really?

However, the core purpose of an MVP is to reduce uncertainty, validate assumptions, and learn we are building the right thing.

We need to be confident we are ready to go live and push past that fear.

Getting that confidence comes from getting comfortable with the definition of an MVP and why you are building it.

Jeff Patton states in his book, User Story Mapping, that an “MVP is not the crappiest product you could release” but “the smallest solution release that successfully achieves its desired outcomes”.

To answer, what is minimum? You need to know what outcomes you are looking for.  Your minimum is the bar you need to reach, what your first version must be to achieve your desired outcomes.

For the MVP products and features I have put live, taking the time upfront to feel comfortable with where that bar is and how you will know you have reached it, is where time should go.

Really break the minimum down, get to what you see as the smallest solution, and then ask yourself again, can we make this smaller?

A deadline will help this.  You might have more MVP experience than you think, if you go over all the meetings you have come out of saying there is no way we can get that live by then!?

Getting Past the Fear Line

I came out of one of those meetings, with 6 weeks to build a solution for Babylon Health to send private prescriptions for the Digital Pharmacy, Phlo, who I worked for then.   Sitting down with our then Head of Engineering, straight after that meeting, we got down on paper the minimum we needed to make a viable solution, it was a lot less work and a lot less scary than we first thought.  Delivering that project successfully, within the 6 weeks, is still one of my proudest ‘we did it’ product moments!

That said, in health technology, in any regulated industry or going live to a significant user group, be mindful that your bar for minimum needs to be higher.

Rand Fishkin warns in his book, Lost and Founder, that the problem with MVPs is that “you build brand association with the first version” and “MVPs are ideal for some circumstances but harmful in others”, he writes of Exceptional Viable Products.

To know if your bar needs to be higher, you need to know, what is viable?

For this I like to reference, and in some cases use, Amazon’s requirement of a one page or six page press release/FAQ document, before any idea or product goes past the discovery stage.  In Working Backwards by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr, they explain that these PRs were the only way “to truly understand the specific constraints and problems that would prevent a new product idea from being viable”.

Answering your internal and external FAQs before you build, including feasibility, dependencies, regulatory requirements and economics, means you get to that go live date with less questions, less uncertainty and less 45 degree fear!

In order to get to that go live date though, you do need your smallest solution and to answer what is a product, or more importantly, what is your product?

This doesn’t need to be a capital P product, Jeff Patton also describes Eric Ries experiments as MVPe’s and some solutions as just that, a Minimal Viable Solution.

That said, from my early start up days, I do place importance on a different P for an MVP too and that is Payment.

For your product to be viable, it needs to validate a viable business model and to reduce uncertainty and fear that people won’t pay for your product, ask yourself in discovery ‘what is the smallest solution people will be willing to pay for?’

Whilst you know the most about a product after it goes live, and something is > than nothing. Adoption or value found in a free solution, with no way to monetise, is leaning back off that mountain without a rope!

To close out on my analogy of the 45 degree MVP fear. The best bit of an abseil is being past that tipping point, when you realise you are doing it, you didn’t die and you get to experience why you are doing this. As with anything scary, and anything product for that matter, pushing past that fear point is where you find the value.

So go and write that press release for your next Minimum Viable Product, to end with a Natasha Bedingfield quote, ‘the rest is still unwritten…’ 

Author and one time abseiler: Katie Beaton, Head of Product at Simple Online Healthcare