Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

The smallest version of a product that delivers enough value to satisfy early customers and provides feedback to guide future development. The MVP is not a minimal product — it must genuinely solve the core problem for its target users. The term was popularized by Eric Ries in The Lean Startup. MVPs are built and released quickly to validate assumptions about customer needs before investing in a full-featured product. Each MVP release is a learning experiment: does it solve the problem, and do users want it? Insights from early users shape the product backlog. In agile teams, the MVP concept influences backlog prioritization — what is the smallest increment that validates the core hypothesis?