Minimum viable product

When a company starts, it must define its initial offering. The idea of an MVP is to come up with the minimum list of features that would allow the company to explore and validate the market potential of their idea.

Developing an MVP for science-based startups is hard, because there's already a specific insight that is going to be commercialized (solutions in search of a market).

The objective of the MVP is manyfold. On the one hand it should allow to test the market thesis, meaning that there's someone willing to pay for the solution. On the other, it should demonstrate which core features are relevant for different users.

And the constraints are also important: the MVP should be developable with the resources already available.

At this point, I like to bring in jobs theory to the discussion, since it allows to map out the metrics the users will use to judge our offer.

One of the complicated aspects is that premature scaling can limit system iteration. Careful consideration is necessary to optimize the learnings that an MVP will produce.