A minimum viable product (MVP) is the smallest version of a product that lets a team collect maximum validated customer learning with the least effort. The term was coined by Frank Robinson in 2001 and popularized by Eric Ries in "The Lean Startup" (2011), where it became the foundational unit of the build-measure-learn loop.
The point of an MVP is to test a hypothesis about what customers actually want, not to ship a smaller version of a finished product. A real MVP is just enough to expose the riskiest assumption to real customer behavior. Famous examples make the standard concrete. Dropbox's original MVP was a three-minute explainer video that drove its waitlist from 5,000 to 75,000 signups overnight, before ...