Minimum Viable Product

An MVP is the leanest version that still teaches you something true about whether people want the thing. The word that gets dropped is viable — it has to deliver enough real value to generate an honest signal, or you’ve learned nothing but how to ship a stub.

At Paus I launched four MVPs with instrumentation built in from the first commit, which cut our time-to-market roughly fourfold. The trick is deciding up front what question the MVP must answer, then building only what answers it.