The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.
Interpretation
The minimum viable product is a basic version of a product that helps gather insights from customers efficiently.
Eric Ries emphasizes that the minimum viable product (MVP) is a critical strategy for startups and product developers. It serves as the simplest version of a product that can be released to early adopters, allowing teams to learn about customer preferences and behaviors with minimal resources, ultimately guiding future development and enhancements based on actual user feedback.
In practice
This quote can be used in a startup workshop to illustrate principles of lean product development.
There's nothing wrong with raising venture capital. Many lean startups are ambitious and are able to deploy large amounts of capital. What differentiates them is their disciplined approach to determining when to spend money: after the fundamental elements of the business model have been empirically validated.
Building the right product requires systematically and relentlessly testing that vision to discover which elements of it are brilliant, and which are crazy.
A lot of entrepreneurs hate big companies. But if you hate them so much, why are you trying to build a new one? The truth is, as soon as a startup has any kind of success whatsoever, it will face big company problems.
The grim reality is that most start-ups fail. Most new products are not successful. Yet the story of perseverance, creative genius, and hard work persists.
The reality is the Lean Startup method is not about cost, it is about speed. Lean startups waste less money, because they use a disciplined approach to testing new products and ideas.
You get a culture of entrepreneurship after you have successfully changed the accountability system so that people can use a better process. Process drives culture, not the other way around, so you can't just change the culture, you have to change the system.
I love technology, and I love science. It's just always all in the way you use it. So there's no - you can't really blame anything on the technology. It's just the way people use it, and it always has been.
Coding is like writing, and we live in a time of the new industrial revolution. What's happened is that maybe everybody knows how to use computers, like they know how to read, but they don't know how to write.
We could say we want the Web to reflect a vision of the world where everything is done democratically. To do that, we get computers to talk with each other in such a way as to promote that ideal.
Social media's greatest assets - anonymity, 'virality,' interconnectedness - are also its main weaknesses.
What matters is 'Have you done a better job of making our experiences feel like home on Windows?' That's our real goal, and that's what we're going to stay focused on.
That has always been the objective of Apple: to do things that really enrich people's lives. That you look back on and you wonder, 'How did I live without this?'
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