An MVP — Minimum Viable Product — is the smallest version of a product that is sufficient to test a specific assumption and learn from it. The goal is not to build something presentable but to find out as quickly as possible whether the core idea holds. The guiding question is: What is the minimum we must build to verify this one assumption?
The most famous example is Dropbox: the team did not build a functioning cloud storage service but a three-minute explanatory video showing how the product would work. Overnight, 70,000 people signed up for the waitlist. The decisive assumption was confirmed — people want a simple way to sync files — without a single line of production code. Other MVP forms include landing pages, concierge services, or Wizard-of-Oz setups, depending on which assumption needs to be tested.
The term was coined in 2001 by Frank Robinson and popularized by Eric Ries through the Lean Startup movement. The most common mistake: ignoring the M in MVP and building a half-finished product instead of a genuine learning instrument.
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