It might be time to revisit the idea of the Minimum Viable Product, because we're in danger of losing its power to help us fail fast/fail cheap. 

In Eric Ries' book The Lean Startup, he describes the MVP as, "that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort." 

In other words, the MVP was meant to be an ethnographic research tool. However, it is starting to turn into a cost-cutting measure to create bare minimum digital experiences.

The three big challenges with qualitative insight research are that people fabricate answers, they are not necessarily experts in what they’re being asked, and they have no basis for a vision of the future state. This is why digital qualitative research has long-since gravitated towards ethnographic research, where you observe and draw insights from actual behaviour. 

The point of the MVP is to create an experience that is real enough to elicit the kind of behaviour from which you can validly draw insights. It’s a great way to fail fast, fail cheap.

Now that we are 7 years along since The Lean Startup was published (an eternity in the digital space), we often confuse MVPs with Betas. In other words, there is increasing pressure to create what I call a minimal acceptable product (MAP); one that we can feel just comfortable with to launch. In the rush to create a MAP, we often skip the MVP. The problems with this are as follows. 

Skipping the MVP can mean skipping the kind of research necessary to get the experience right in the first place. We have come so far in the world of digital ethnography’s ability to mobilize online behaviour to help reach business objectives, it would be tragic to let that fall by the wayside. Tragic, and expensive. 

Jumping right to the MAP without sufficient user insight runs the now-obvious risk that, not only will the experience be stripped-down and underfunded, it will also not address the real needs of the user. 

The whole point of the MVP is not just to validate the experience we want to create, it is also about uncovering hidden needs that no one had noticed before. Is there really a net benefit to foregoing those nuggets of strategic insight in our rush to get things out the door? Spoiler alert: No. 

Last, rushing right to MAPs can give us a false sense of cost-effectiveness, because it often feels like we got to the solution by both reducing planning resources and keeping the scope under control. However, if the experience created is all wrong to begin with, the initial cost savings will quickly disappear in the swirl of poor results. 

We should revisit the MVP for what it was intended in the first place: a tool to help uncover the kind of insights we need in order to fail fast and fail cheap.