If It’s Six Figures, It’s Not a Minimum Viable Product

Understanding the real purpose and strategy behind a minimum viable product is crucial for anyone aiming to launch successful products, minimize wasted resources, and make evidence-based decisions. Whether you’re leading a startup, managing a product team, or building digital solutions, mastering MVPs will help you validate ideas faster, reduce costly mistakes, and create products that truly meet user needs.

Most teams misuse the concept of a minimum viable product (MVP) by treating them as small versions of a final product rather than as tools to reduce risk and validate decisions. A real MVP exists to generate evidence, test assumptions, and change what you do next — not to justify early building or premature investment.

Most Minimum Viable Products (MVP) fail because they’re treated like small versions of the final product instead of tools to validate decisions.

That sentence alone will probably annoy a few people. Good. Because the way most teams talk about MVPs today has very little to do with how MVPs actually work in practice.

An MVP isn’t about building less. It’s about learning the right things before you build more. Specifically, it’s about identifying the minimum set of functionality required to test your riskiest assumptions with real users, using minimal resources, before committing to further development.

Not learning everything. Not learning eventually. Learning the things that reduce risk now. When teams forget that distinction, MVPs quietly turn into expensive theatre. Lots of activity. Very little clarity.

The MVP Myth That Won’t Die

Somewhere along the way, MVP became shorthand for:

• a cheap version of the product
• a junior team project
• a lightly designed prototype
• a fast way to say “we shipped”

None of those are the point. An MVP is not a delivery tactic. It’s a strategy decision.

The MVP approach exists to validate assumptions under uncertainty — about users, market demand, business models, or technical feasibility — not to justify rushing something out the door.

When teams frame MVPs as “small products,” they optimise for speed and cost. That sounds efficient, but it rarely produces insight. When they frame MVPs as learning tools, they optimise for evidence, validated learning, and decision-making. Those two mindsets lead to very different outcomes, even when the work looks similar on the surface.

What an MVP Actually Is (And Isn’t)

Let’s be precise, because vagueness is where most MVPs die.

An MVP is not:

• a cheaper version of the final product
• a design-less experiment
• a placeholder roadmap item
• a way to appease stakeholders

An MVP is:

• a decision-validation tool
• a learning mechanism
• a risk-reduction strategy

The only job of an MVP is to answer a hard question before you commit real time, significant resources, or long-term budget.

It exists to test whether a business idea, assumption, or direction holds up when exposed to reality. A proper MVP is a functional version of a product with enough core features to support real-world testing, gather customer feedback, and observe actual user behaviour.

If nothing changes after the MVP, it wasn’t doing any real work.

A bad MVP doesn’t validate anything.

It just creates bad data.

Why So Many MVPs Fail

Most MVPs fail for one simple reason. They’re scoped for delivery, not learning.

Teams build something that feels reasonable, ship it, and move on. There’s no explicit hypothesis. No defined success criteria. No decision tied to the outcome. The MVP becomes a milestone instead of an instrument in an iterative process.

At that point, calling it an MVP is just comforting language.

Viability turns into a vibe:

• “Users didn’t hate it.”
• “It could work.”
• “We’ll improve it later.”

None of those statements force action. None of them reduce risk. None of them demand accountability.

If your MVP can’t teach you anything meaningful, it’s not an MVP.

UX and Customer Feedback Turn an MVP Into an Experiment

One of the most common mistakes teams make is treating UX as optional in MVPs.

That’s backwards.

UX is what turns a minimum viable product from a guess into an experiment. Without it, you’re not testing behaviour — you’re testing tolerance.

Good MVPs validate three things:

• user behaviour
• business assumptions
• technical feasibility

UX is the connective tissue that makes those validations legible. Through user interviews, usability testing, observation, and real-world testing, teams can see not just what users do, but why. That context is what transforms early builds into evidence instead of anecdotes.

A poorly designed MVP doesn’t fail fast.

It fails silently, producing false negatives and false confidence at the same time.

MVPs and Product Thinking

MVPs make sense when you treat something as a product, not a one-off deliverable.

Product thinking assumes continuity. Learning compounds. Decisions build on each other through continuous iteration and iterative development.

If you ship and walk away, you didn’t build an MVP.

You just launched.

This matters for websites, platforms, internal tools, and digital systems that behave like products whether teams acknowledge it or not. MVP thinking fits naturally once you accept that early versions are inputs into a longer system of learning that informs further development.

The Tennis POV: MVPs in Complex Projects

At Tennis, we typically recommend MVPs when the risk is structural rather than cosmetic.

That often looks like:

• complex business logic
• new workflows or platforms
• internal tools or portals
• first-of-kind or high-uncertainty ideas

In these contexts, MVPs act as alignment tools across business, design, and engineering teams. They replace false confidence from decks, wireframes, and internal consensus with evidence teams can actually argue with. They slow teams down just enough to avoid expensive rework later in the development process.

MVPs aren’t shortcuts.

They’re seatbelts.

If the risk is high, skipping validation isn’t bold.

It’s reckless.

“If It’s Six Figures, It’s Not an MVP” (Mostly)

This line gets attention because it pokes at something uncomfortable.

It’s not really about cost.

It’s about proportionality.

If you’re spending six figures and still can’t articulate:

• what assumption you’re testing
• what success looks like
• what decision the result will support

then you’re not running an MVP.

You’re just building early.

Yes, some MVPs are expensive, especially in complex enterprise environments. That’s fine. What isn’t fine is investing significant time or resources without clear hypotheses, validated learning, or a defined next decision.

An MVP that doesn’t change your roadmap is just a smaller mistake.

MVP vs Proof of Concept (Why the Confusion Exists)

We often see teams label work as an MVP when it’s closer to a proof of concept.

That’s not a failure.

It’s a signal.

Proof implies:

• a claim
• evidence
• a standard of sufficiency
• a conclusion

Proofs of concept often focus on testing feasibility or specific features. MVPs go further by testing assumptions with real users in real conditions, using market research and customer feedback to validate market need.

Viability is fuzzier. It’s contextual and easily hand-waved.

Most so-called MVPs never reach users in a way that meaningfully changes decisions. Calling them MVPs gives them legitimacy they haven’t earned.

The issue isn’t the label.

It’s the lack of burden of proof.

What Makes a Good MVP Strategy

A strong MVP strategy starts with clarity, not scope.

It begins with the riskiest assumption, not the easiest feature. Success is defined before anything is designed. Scope is set around learning, not completeness, with a disciplined focus on essential features and essential functionality.

Good MVP strategies also:

• use minimal resources to control development costs
• engage potential users and early adopters early
• gather customer feedback through interviews, testing, and observation
• rely on data-driven decisions rather than opinions
• plan explicitly for future development once assumptions are validated

Market insights, competitive landscape analysis, and understanding competing products help teams position MVPs effectively and avoid building in isolation.

The goal isn’t applause.

It’s clarity.