Maximum Viable Product

We keep hearing every now and then about MVP or minimum viable product. It's become part of pop culture all over the globe ever since Eric Ries came up with his seminal book Lean Startup where he actually used the term MVP. Now the entire world namely the startup ecosystem is going bonkers with this term and everyone seems to have different definitions of MVP. Interestingly even Maslow would have never thought his Pyramid of Needs would one day have a successor called MVP. Technically MVP is the the most minimal version of the product that solves a customer need effectively. When we talk about solving the customer needs effectively we need to understand what it means realistically. That is the point where the late professor Clayton Christensen's Job Theory can help. Clay explained that if a product or service can help a customer do his job far more effectively than the current market alternatives than he would immediately become a customer.

Now as we are moving to the next stage of digital capitalism, we are factoring in customer centric metrics to understand more about customer happiness. But if we try to think from a customer's perspective, it's actually the other way round. A customer(if we talk explicitly about Indian middle class) wants to buy everything in one product. He doesn't want to splurge his money on buying multiple products that can fulfil his needs. At the same time his budget is limited. In fact from a segment perspective, any prospective customer would not want to buy multiple products to cater to all different types of needs one has but a singular product that can solve all his needs. Isn't that against the entire definition of MVP or Minimum Viable product where a product is designed to solve the most primordial problem a customer has? Not really.

The thing is- most customers expect everything that's remotely possible in this world but beneath all that there are some primordial needs that need to be met. If a minimum viable product tends to meet all those needs then it's moving in a direction where it is supposed to tap all wants and needs a customer has in due course of time. If it effectively manages to translate all of that into beautiful features that can make a customer engaged then it is no longer a Minimum Viable product but a Maximum Viable Product. The surprising thing is- in the absence of a competing product, most customers will go for a minimum viable product that can help solve their problems but when alternatives are available then customers will most often pick Maximum Viable products that can cater to all their needs and wants. Maximum Viable products operate mostly in red oceans and tend to outshine each other on the basis of incremental innovation in either technology or process. The eventual fate of a Minimum Viable Product is a Maximum Viable Product keeping the customer at the epicenter. MaxVP has a lot to do with market research. The research has to be as foolproof as FMCG companies like HUL do, to understand anything and everything about the customer. As a product manager or an entrepreneur, do you see your product becoming an MaxVP in the next few years? If yes then that means there is a lot to be done to build that MVP that would touchbase the late majority in the technology adoption lifecyle as follows taken from this blog by Shivayogi Kumbar:-