Essay · ~1,000 words

Minimum Viable Product Revisited

Kent Beck · Tidy First (Kent Beck) Free Intermediate

Beck, a foundational voice in software, adds useful nuance about what minimal really means and why teams so often get it wrong. His argument that you rarely know the right minimal product up front, so start smaller, guards against building too much under the MVP label. A thoughtful counterweight when your MVP is quietly growing into a full product.

  • You usually do not know the true minimal product in advance
  • When in doubt, start smaller than feels comfortable
  • Minimal is defined by the learning you need, not the roadmap
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It answers 3 questions

  1. What's the difference between an MVP and just a cheap, half-finished product?
  2. My MVP needs users to log in, pay, and get notifications. Should I build auth, payments, and email myself or glue together no-code and third-party tools?
  3. I keep polishing the design and refactoring instead of shipping. How do I know I'm gold-plating my MVP versus doing necessary work?

Read with it

  1. The single best thing ever written on customer conversations. It teaches you to ask about the customer's life and past... momtestbook.com Book · ~130 pages The Mom Test Rob Fitzpatrick
  2. The permission slip to recruit users by hand, do things manually, and deliver 'insanely great' experiences to your first few... paulgraham.com Essay · ~15 min read Do Things That Don't Scale Paul Graham
  3. The essay that put 'product-market fit' into the startup vocabulary. Read it for the gut-level description of what PMF feels... pmarchive.com Essay · ~15 min read The Only Thing That Matters Marc Andreessen
  4. Michael Seibel, who ran YC, makes the blunt case for shipping something almost embarrassingly simple and learning from real... Y Combinator Startup Library Video · ~10 min video How to Build an MVP Michael Seibel
  5. Turns the vague feeling of product-market fit into a number you can move. Ask users how they would feel if they could no longer... First Round Review Article · ~20 min read How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit Rahul Vohra
  6. The book that gave the world 'MVP', 'build-measure-learn', and 'validated learning'. It reframes a startup as a series of... theleanstartup.com Book · ~330 pages The Lean Startup Eric Ries
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