What is Under Your Control in an MVP

What is Under Your Control in an MVP? Your target customer, the problem you solve for them, and what capabilities you offer to help them.

What is Under Your Control in an MVP

We use this definition in our “Engineering Your Sales” and “Validating Your MVP” workshops and our MVP clinics. Our focus is on developing and selling products to businesses so that biases the definition a little bit but it’s important to remember what’s under your control in crafting your MVP:

1. The particular type of customer: you can select who are you targeting and messaging. In many B2B markets the best message is a dog whistle: highly appealing to your target and of little interest to those who are not.
2. The specific problem or need your focus on: it’s better to pick a very narrow pain point initially so that you maximize your chances of providing value.
3. What you provide: the feature set and packaging of your offering.

These are normally the three areas that you tinker with during marketing exploration and MVP introduction. It’s also important to understand what’s not under your control: 

1. The customer decides if the need is important enough, or the problem severe enough, to devote any time to conversation or learning more about your offering.
2. The customer decides if your solution offers enough of a difference over the status quo and other alternatives available to them to actively consider. Value is in the customer’s mind and it’s created in the customer’s business when they successfully deploy your offering. Your MVP is not valuable in the abstract; it must always be evaluated in the context of a particular customer. It does not matter how much time and expense you have invested in creating it, it’s the effect it will have on the customer’s business.
3. The customer decides the nature and size of the initial purchase. You can decide not to pursue an opportunity that is “too small” but if the customer wants to pilot in a team or one department before deploying your solution more widely it’s often better to take that deal and get started than continue to argue for a larger initial deal. Breaking your offering into phases and smaller components will always make it easier to digest.

The following chalk talk illustrates this last point in more detail:

See “Chalk Talk on Technology Adoption” for a transcript.

Related Blog Posts

• A Common MVP Evolution: Service to System Integration to Product
• An MVP is Finished Only After You Have Early Adopters
• Q: How Do You Iterate An MVP So That It’s “Good Enough For Government Work”
• “Better” is the Enemy of “Good Enough”
• Even For Demanding Markets, An MVP That’s a 70% Solution is Often Good Enough
• MVP: Are You Building a Death Star?
• Office Hours: Schedule Time To Walk Around Your MVP

Image Credit: “An MVP is an Offering for Sale” (c) SKMurphy, Inc. all rights reserved