This week I asked the question .. do you ..

  1. Go live with a MVP and scale it
    Or
  2. Go live with a MVP to explore and understand what’s really needed to scale

Those that responded on LinkedIn all slanted towards option 2.

I’m hoping this means that the world of MVPs is a world of stitching together a skeleton solution and analysing the experiences from a customer and an operating model perspective.

I’m hoping this means selecting the set of technical components that are perceived to help test and demonstrate what can be achieved within a sub set of the end goals and to test hypothesis and considerations of what it will take to scale.

The fascinating and intriguing response though and the response that got my brain buzzing the most was from Adrian Sweeney.

“Neither so I’ll be a bit challenging. MVP and it’s poor cousin POC have become finance checkpoints to stop or defer a significant majority of initiatives. Go for a full product and develop it as you go.”

An interesting perspective and based on some of the MVP and POC discussions I’ve witnessed over the years I can see where he is coming from.

However thinking a bit deeper I wondered if there is a difference between the world of “start up” MVP and “corporate MVP”.

The start up is usually

  • Constrained from a cash and resource perspective
  • Wants to prove it has a viable idea

When it launches an MVP it doesn’t have

  • An existing set of systems to integrate with
  • An army of legacy processes and teams who are used to working in a different way
  • A customer base that already understands and knows how to work with the products and services of the business

It’s MVP stage is assessing is the idea desirable, what will need to be but in place for the idea to be feasible as it scales and based on the costs to deliver the desirability and required feasibility is it viable viable,

The start up is perfect for the MVP approach as the outcome is a bit more binary.

However in the corporate world an MVP is trying to play into

  • Be add on product and services to existing customers that could open up new markets
  • Often with the intention of deploying into existing teams.
  • Often integrating into some of the existing systems that were designed to work with existing customers, products and services
  • And fit with many established tech policies and governance processes

It’s a different world and the considerations of the MVP of an entirely new business and how it will shape and design the entire business and operating model as it scales is understandably different to the world of MVPs that will have to explore and test within the remit of scaling into the existing business.

And as Adrian says once the finance, risk and governance councils of the corporate get into full swing of assessing the MVP through the governance gates it can be a very different story

It can feel as if the MVP is very much being agreed to, to test

  • A hypothesis of a solution (understood in great depth from an internal perspective) looking for a customers problem
  • It has been imagined, described, hypothesised in detailed slide decks, excel spreadsheets and word documents with the scaled solution in mind
  • It has had a lot of the more open minded aspects of an MVP approach of a start up squeezed out of it
  • And the aspects that are set up to be tested are on the minimum viable disruption to the existing business rather than from a perspective of unlocking the maximum opportunity and being prepared to change all aspects of the operating model to capture the potential

These were thoughts that ran through my mind with Adrian’s comments.

What’s your thoughts?

Have you worked on MVP for start ups and tried to incorporate the same thinking into MVPs in corporates?

Is there any research out there that shows the MVP corporate vs start up approaches?

As ever interested in your views