Minimum Viability Eats The World

A while back, one of my leading posts was Agile Is Eating The World, where I riffed off on Andressen’s quote Software Is Eating The World. In that post, I talk about how agile project management, typically used for software engineering, is not only great for software engineering, but it's also great for a ton of other non-engineering and non-software things, like managing your life.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about the highly successful concept of the Minimum Viable Product, a concept invented by Eric Ries, mostly appropriate for startups — from the book The Lean Startup. I’ve been thinking about how the concept of agile has a lot of applications outside of the software engineering and product management space — and how the MVP concept can be used elsewhere.

If you are not familiar with the concept, it is literally “the least you can do” when it comes to product development. The idea is to develop an MVP, which is not much more than a working proof-of-concept, and release it to the world (or at least a subset of your possible customers), gather feedback on the product, rapidly iterate (in an agile fashion), and pivot, until you reach product/market fit.

A minimum viable product (MVP) is a concept from Lean Startup that stresses the impact of learning in new product development. Eric Ries, defined an MVP as that version of a new…