In a conversation the other day, the focus was around the integration of the Agile methodology with Lean Startup and the cycle of build > measure > learn and how concepts from Lean Startup can complement an Agile software development process. One of the intriguing ideas that carry over into enterprise mobile development is a Minimal Viable Product or MVP. Quite a bit has been written this year about moving to a “mobile first” 
enterprise, especially as the threshold of “7.1 Billion people and 7.1 Billion mobile phone subscriptions worldwide” has been reached. Corporate IT needs to adapt to this new way of working or run the risk of employees and managers bypassing the IT organization and creating a large shadow IT environment. There have been numerous examples in the past, the one that comes to mind is the Microsoft Access-based systems that cropped up in enterprise departments in the 1990s when IT could not meet the needs of business and so departments created their own IT systems and thus, silos of data with no interoperability. Corporate IT needs to get ahead of this new wave and demonstrate to the business that they are the right organization implement and manage it. It is imperative for IT to embrace mobile by examining how to enable mobile applications and understand the challenges of a “mobile first” environment. The question becomes, how does IT do that?
So, back to the original topic which was the Minimal Viable Product or MVP. IT needs to work with business to identify problems that are occurring within the organization and look to solve it through mobile. In the case of software development, a minimal viable product (MVP) is a software product that meets the minimum requirements of the end user so that these users can test the product and offer immediate feedback to the mobile development team to iterate on. The feedback is reviewed and incorporated into the next build of the product. Releasing the MVP frequently demonstrates to the end users that a) they have a voice into the mobile app’s design and b) the IT organization is attempting to meet the mobile needs of the business. Creating a number of MVPs targeted at various segments of the business user community with an organization allows IT to understand what these groups are looking for, what is useful and how the IT infrastructure needs to adapt to support mobile. Those MVPs that “scratch the itch” of the user community can be further developed into a valuable enterprise mobile application and discard the ones that do not add value.
One word of warning however, as Abraham Wallin pointed out in his article: Lost in Translation: The Minimal Viable Product, the word “Viable” seems to be pushed into the shadows of “Minimal”. A minimal viable product cannot be poorly designed, all of the learning and feedback from the end users is lost and it will be difficult to get the end users engaged for any subsequent releases or other mobile products created by IT. Creating an MVP requires an entire team of UX, interface design and development so that, even though the product may only have a subset of functionality, it meets base quality and usability standards.
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