Using The User

Minimum Viable Product and your brand

Minimum viable product is a brilliant idea. However, there is a dark side. When you actually release an MVP, you are burning your brand value.

It's interesting that many of the people who are interested in the Minimum Viable Product approach are also fans of Apple products and Apple product strategy. Does Apple ever release an MVP? No. That would damage their brand. They release products that are streamlined, but fully designed and tested and packaged by fanatics for their intended use. That's why people feel good about using Apple products.

A Minimum Viable Product is by definition not a very good product. It's a product with annoying gaps. You want people to complain about those gaps. You want to find the gaps that are worth complaining about. You are not trying to give the user the best possible experience. You are using the user to help you design your product and business model.

A skilled user of the MVP concept conducts very brief tests, or tests with a small number of users. The tests are long enough to get useful feedback from user reactions, but not long enough to change the brand perception for the bulk of potential users.

Using the user

When you release a product for beta testing, you are not doing it for the benefit of the user. The product is likely to have bugs. It changes frequently. Just when the user is getting used to one behavior, you put in a different behavior. You are doing the release for the benefit of your developers. Your development team needs the feedback they get from the beta release, and they use it to make a better product. The users are serving the developers.

Using the user can be a good thing. It's an important resource for development, provided that you know when to do it and when to stop doing it.

If you are a business that offers free products or services, you can exploit the customers who use them. Those cheapskates owe you something. Hit them with MVP-style tests and changes. Minimize the damage by making the tests short, or exposing them to a subset of users. In a mature product, keep tests fast and small.

If you get good enough at this tactic, it becomes an efficient way to replace other types of testing. In an online system where you can do real-time release and rollback on multiple servers, you can push your changes to a few servers and watch the results.

When to flip

When a product is ready for full release, flip your priorities. The customer is always right, and the development team serves them.

When you are building a new product you are using three precious resources: time, money, and brand goodwill. As you try to make a better product, you will burn each of these resources in calculated amounts. You will make decisions about when to burn money and brand to drive development. You will do this as quickly as possible. You will make decisions about when to switch back, make money, and build brand value with consistent quality. Go forth and prosper.