Minimum Viable Lovable Product

A Minimal Loveble Product is the minimal version of your innovation (product, service, campaign, process) that a customer can fall in love with. ‘Minimal’ in the sense that there is no extra, just the bare bones. ‘Product’ in the sense that the customer or user gets a feeling that this is a whole thing which solves a real problem (c.f. not an individual experiment). With the MLP you can gather evidence whether you are on the right track at all, or perhaps you need to pivot. A pivot is a major change to one or more of the concept’s components when a hypothesis about user behaviour doesn’t meet the reality.  

The lecture starts off with explaining pivoting, introduces its multiple categories and illustrates pivoting with several famous examples like Twitter and Starbucks. Then the idea of MVP (MLP) is introduced while arguing that an MVP is built also for the other stakeholders, not only the customers. The main purpose of an MVP is to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort. Although an MVP has many different definitions, the lecture explains four core properties MVP should always have. It should be minimal, viable, it should be in form of product and it should be killable. Finally the lecture closes off with suggesting that an MVP is not a piece of pretty design to astonish the client (or other stakeholders) but rather a minimalistic experiment to see whether you’re on the right track.