I think it’s a pointless bike shedding exercise to discuss which of your shipping versions was the MVP. I note your mentor is from Google - rather notorious for keeping things in beta long after it’s shipped to millions of users, and killing off viable products because they measure success in billions of users.
MVP is about optimising the risk of your investment of effort and money in a new product. It’s not a lagging indicator given by external usage. It’s a decision you make about readiness to launch.
Don’t waste time waiting for someone else to tell you that the third version after launch was your MVP. Make the hard decisions about whether you need more design work before launch. After launch, focus on feedback and product fit. Don’t spend time asking “is our already shipping product MVP yet?”
(Of course at scale, there are decisions to be made about launching into new markets, integration into other products, how much to spend on marketing, lining up partnerships. All of which may in fact be determined by success to date. But for the product you describe, these are very separate to the MVP conversation you need to have)
It's not about looking back at earlier versions that have shipped and trying to classify them, nor is it about asking someone else. Rather, when there's a disagreement as to whether we can launch what we have, with one side saying, "It's fine to launch, it's an MVP after all" and the other side saying "No it's not at MVP quality yet", take a step back and remember that both sides may mean different things by MVP, as the post says.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 21.3 ms ] threadThe idea is to get something out the door and iterating on that. That started at 0.1.
MVP is about optimising the risk of your investment of effort and money in a new product. It’s not a lagging indicator given by external usage. It’s a decision you make about readiness to launch.
Don’t waste time waiting for someone else to tell you that the third version after launch was your MVP. Make the hard decisions about whether you need more design work before launch. After launch, focus on feedback and product fit. Don’t spend time asking “is our already shipping product MVP yet?”
(Of course at scale, there are decisions to be made about launching into new markets, integration into other products, how much to spend on marketing, lining up partnerships. All of which may in fact be determined by success to date. But for the product you describe, these are very separate to the MVP conversation you need to have)
It's not about looking back at earlier versions that have shipped and trying to classify them, nor is it about asking someone else. Rather, when there's a disagreement as to whether we can launch what we have, with one side saying, "It's fine to launch, it's an MVP after all" and the other side saying "No it's not at MVP quality yet", take a step back and remember that both sides may mean different things by MVP, as the post says.