I have worked with many people who want to build the next Facebook, Netflix, Google, or whatever the latest successful product happens to be. The vision is usually ambitious, which is not a bad thing. In fact, I think having a big vision is important. The problem is when the vision for the eventual product becomes the specification for the first version.

I have seen teams with relatively small budgets and ambitious timelines try to build dozens of features because, in their minds, every feature is necessary. They try to do a little bit of everything, but because time, money, and attention are finite, they end up with a product where everything is only half good. Some features are barely functional, others are unnecessarily complicated, and the overall experience feels unfinished.

Then they launch.

Users do not respond the way they hoped. Investors are not impressed. The team looks at the results and concludes that perhaps the original idea was not that good.

But sometimes the idea was never the problem. The product simply never gave the idea a fair chance.

This is one of the reasons I believe understanding your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is so important.

So, what exactly is an MVP?

An MVP, or Minimum Viable Product, is the smallest complete and usable version of a product that delivers its core value to its intended users and allows you to test the concept in the real world.

The word “minimum” is important, but so is “viable.”

Your MVP is not a raw prototype. It is also not a collection of half-working features. It should be something you can actually launch and reasonably expect people to use.

At the same time, it does not need every feature you have imagined for the next five years. The purpose of an MVP is to focus your resources on the part of the product that matters most right now, prove that there is something worth building, and create room to learn before making larger investments.

That last part is important. It is where strategy turns into practice. It is the point where you stop treating the MVP as a one-off delivery exercise and start using it as a learning system that continuously informs what you build next. Without that discipline, teams tend to either overbuild too early or drift without direction, instead of letting real user behaviour guide the evolution of the product.

You do not need to know everything about your eventual product before you build version one; you only need to know where to start.

How do you identify your MVP?

When I am working with someone who has a long list of features and everything feels like a priority, I usually bring the conversation back to the product’s core value.

I start with questions like:

Who are you building this for?
What problem are you solving for them?
What do these users actually need?
If there is one thing you want this product to be remembered for, or one thing I want people to come to this product for, what is it?

The answers to these questions help you separate the product’s core functionality from everything else you would like it to do.

From there, I like to ask:

What is the barebones version of this product that can deliver that value without all the bells and whistles?

That is where your MVP starts to emerge.

For example, if you are building a learning platform, your long-term vision might include advanced assessments, discussion forums, communities, gamification, certificates, mobile apps, AI tutors, sophisticated analytics, integrations, and dozens of other features.

Those things may eventually make the product better. They may even become important to the business. However, if the fundamental proposition is that people can come to your platform, find a course, learn something valuable, and complete that course, your MVP may not need to do all of those other things.

The question is not, “Would this feature be useful?”

Of course it would.

The better question is:

“Does the product need this feature to deliver its core value?“

If the answer is no, it may be something you build later.

This is not about deliberately making a bad product. It is about making a focused product.

Your MVP should be good enough to launch without feeling naked and exposed, while still leaving you room to learn, adapt, and grow.

Starting small does not mean staying small

One of my favourite examples of this is Facebook.

Today, Facebook is almost difficult to describe as a single product. For some people, it is primarily a way to stay connected with friends and family. For others, it is an archive of their lives. For creators, it can be a place to build an audience. For businesses, it is an advertising and customer acquisition platform. People use it to join communities, discover events, communicate, consume content, and buy and sell things through Marketplace.

Messenger initially started as Facebook’s built-in messaging feature, but as usage grew and communication patterns became more central to the platform, it was eventually spun out into its own standalone app in 2011, and it has evolved over the years into Facebook Messenger as we know it today.

None of that was the starting point.

Facebook began with a much narrower purpose. It was created as a way for students at Harvard to connect with one another, and it subsequently expanded to other schools before eventually becoming available to a much broader audience.

The product did not need to know on day one that people would eventually use it for advertising, content creation, commerce, messaging, communities, and everything else it has become, it needed to solve its initial problem.

Then people started using it.

And as people used it, new opportunities became visible. The team could observe what people were doing, what they valued, how they interacted with one another, and what other problems the platform could potentially solve. The product evolved accordingly.

That evolution is worth paying attention to because your MVP is not a prediction of everything your product will eventually become, but simply the starting point from which you grow and learn what it can become.

Starting small does not mean thinking small.

“The mighty oak was once a little nut that stood its ground.”

Anodea Judith, Eastern Body, Western Mind: Psychology and the Chakra System as a Path to the Self

An acorn does not look anything like an oak tree, but the potential for the oak tree is there. It starts as a seed, and when it is nurtured in the right conditions, it can eventually become a huge, impressive tree that is beautiful and difficult to uproot.

Your MVP can be that acorn.

You can have a very ambitious long-term vision while still being disciplined about what you build first.

Netflix started with DVD rentals before becoming the global streaming and entertainment company we know today. WhatsApp began as a much simpler communication product before growing into the massive messaging platform we know today.

The point is not that every successful company started with an MVP in exactly the same way. The point is that the product you eventually build can be dramatically larger than the product you initially need to prove.

Let the market help you figure out what comes next

One of the biggest mistakes I see is treating the original product plan as though it is a contract.

You come up with an idea, decide what the product should look like, create a massive feature list, and then spend months or years trying to execute that plan exactly as imagined.

But the problem is that you are making assumptions.

You do not yet know exactly how people will use the product.

That is why user feedback matters so much.

Your users should not dictate every decision you make (product leadership still requires you to interpret feedback, understand the business, and make strategic decisions) but you should be willing to let real behaviour challenge your assumptions.

Sometimes the market gives you clarity you simply could not have had at the beginning.

Bubble Wrap is a good example of this: it was originally invented as a textured plastic wallpaper, but it failed commercially because people simply did not want it. It was later repositioned as greenhouse insulation, which also did not take off. In the 1960s, however, something unexpected happened: IBM began using it as protective packaging for shipping computers and finally found product-market fit — the product originally meant to be a trendy wallpaper became a widely successful as packaging material. The people who created it did not get the final use case exactly right on the first attempt, they discovered an opportunity by paying attention to what the product could actually do.

That same principle applies to digital products.

You may not know everything upfront. Sometimes you need to build enough to let the light in. Once you have more clarity, the confusion starts to disappear.

Don’t over-engineer what you have not proven

There is another version of this problem that I see frequently, particularly when technical teams become involved early.

I have worked with senior engineers, and I understand why this happens. Good engineers think about scalability, architecture, maintainability, security, performance, and the problems that might exist several years from now.

Yes, those things matter.

But they do not all need to be solved on day one.

If you are trying to prove whether people actually want your product, spending months building a sophisticated architecture for millions of hypothetical users may be premature.

Take an online learning platform as an example. If the immediate goal is to prove that people will pay for your courses and that the business model works, you may not need to build a custom learning platform from scratch. You might be able to use WordPress and an appropriate learning management system, launch the courses, market them, acquire customers, learn from those customers, and improve the experience.

If the business grows to the point where those tools no longer meet your needs, then you have a much better problem to have.

Now you have customers.

You have revenue.

You have data.

You have built trust with your customers.

Now, thanks to your experience and user feedback, you have a clearer understanding of what the product actually needs and you can make a much more informed technology investment.

Your architecture can evolve with the product.

In my opinion, good engineering is not always about building the most sophisticated solution possible. Sometimes it is about choosing the simplest solution that allows you to move the business forward and knowing when it is time to replace it.

You do not need to solve tomorrow’s technical problems before you have solved today’s business problem.

The danger of investing too much, too early

I also believe there is a financial and psychological reason not to go overboard with your MVP.

I have worked with clients who wanted too much too soon. They put a significant amount of money into building everything upfront, ended up with a product containing many mediocre features, and then needed to make that money back as quickly as possible.

That creates pressure.

Suddenly, instead of asking, “How do we get people to love this product?” the conversation becomes, “How quickly can we recover our investment?”

I have seen that pressure lead to decisions such as charging exorbitant prices for products that, in my opinion, they should have been begging people to try.

The problem started much earlier.

They stretched too far before they knew what they had.

When you keep the initial investment focused, you preserve something extremely valuable: the ability to change direction.

You can pivot the product.

You can change the business model.

You can change the technology.

You can change your priorities.

You can discover that the thing you thought was the most important feature is actually irrelevant, while something you almost dismissed turns out to be incredibly valuable.

That flexibility becomes much harder to maintain when you have spent enormous amounts of money and time building a product around assumptions that have not yet been validated.

Build the MVP, then earn the right to build more

Having a long-term vision is important. You should know what you ultimately want your product or business to become.

But your long-term vision should not force you to build the entire future today.

Identify the people you are building for. Understand the problem you are trying to solve. Determine the core value you want to provide. Then identify the smallest complete product that can deliver that value well. That is your Minimum Viable Product or your MVP.

Build that.

Make it good.

Launch it.

Market it.

Pay attention to what users do, not just what you expected them to do. Gather feedback. Look for patterns. Test your assumptions. Use what you learn to decide what deserves your next investment.

The goal is not to build less forever.

The goal is to build the right things at the right time.

Your MVP should give your idea a fair chance to prove itself before you ask it to carry the weight of an entire vision.

Most products we use and love today did not begin as the versions we know today. They grew over time as opportunities became clearer and the business, technology, and user base evolved.

The same can be true of the product you are building.

An oak tree does not begin as an oak tree. It begins as an acorn.

Your job is not to build the entire tree on day one, it is to make sure you are nurturing the right seed, giving it what it needs to grow, and paying attention to where it is telling you to go.

Identify your MVP. Optimize it. Market it. Learn from it. Then grow.