When an MVP Becomes a Real Product

The Most Dangerous Stage in Product Development

You are making progress when you launch your MVP.

• You shipped something!
• You have users!
• You are getting feedback!
• Investors are interested!

Sounds good, right?

This stage in product development is one of the biggest dangers.

Most teams think:

• “The more users, the more features we need to add.”
• That thinking kills more products than failed MVPs ever will.
• An MVP is not intended to last forever.
• But it must also not be rebuilt too soon.

The toughest question that founders and product teams have to answer is:

At what point does your MVP stop being an MVP and become an Actual Product?

This post will provide a clear answer to this question, describe what indicators you should look for and outline how to transition from an MVP to a scale-ready product without losing speed, focus and momentum.

What an MVP Really Represents (and What It Doesn’t)

• An MVP is a way to reduce uncertainty.
• An MVP provides teams with answers to the following:
• Is this a real problem?
• Do Users Care Enough to Change Their Behaviours?
• Is Anyone Going to Pay for This?
• Does this solution provide repeat value?
• When building an MVP, you should not expect your MVP to be:
• Scalable in the Long Term
• Validate All Edge Cases
• Have Enterprise Grade Reliability
• Feature Complete
• It is easy to confuse an MVP phase and a Production

4 Ways Your MVP Can Help You Transition to a Real Product

Most teams making the transition from MVP to real product fall into one of two traps: (1) treating their MVP like a finished product, and (2) panicking about the state of their MVP too soon and taking drastic actions.

Trap 1: Treating Your MVP Like a Finished Product

When teams treat their MVP like a finished product, they often want to add all of the features that users want, on top of an architecture that is fragile and on top of decisions that were shortcuts and all of the temporary solutions used to get the MVP to the market. This will create a slow, brittle product that cannot grow with the company.

Trap 2: Rebuilding Too Early

Other teams fall into the trap of panicking as soon as they see that their MVP is messy. They may think something like, “My MVP is not going to work. Let’s just throw everything away and rewrite everything.” They waste time and money to stop the momentum and burn through cash, and they end up losing users while they are waiting for the “real version.”

The Best Approach

Neither of these responses is correct. The best approach is that the transition from an MVP to a real product is a considered transition rather than a rewrite or a patch job.

How MVPs and Real Products are Different

MVPs vs Real Products

MVPs Are About

• Learning
• Validation
• Speed
• Narrow Focus
• One Primary User Journey

Real Products Are About

• Reliability
• Scalability
• Maintainability
• Multiple User Journeys
• Long-Term Growth

These two things cannot be optimized at the same time.

While early model viable products (MVPs) say “Yes” to everything requested, a true product must learn how to say “No”.

Once enough requests are received and clustered around such categories as:

• Stable(s)
• Performance(s)
• Integration(s)
• Workflow Depth(s)

Then it is an indication there is now a core identification of your product.

Individuals are willing and/or want to pay for it.

However, monetization also creates urgency, thus creates the urgency to be able to meet all the initial criteria.

This Could Mean Your Product’s First Steps Toward Monetization Were Close To Being Achieved Based Upon Previous Evidence Provided.

2) Reasoning Why Manual Work Is Now Causing Internal Breakdowns

The life cycle of any MVP requires all manual processes (onboarding, fixes, reporting, etc.).

However as soon as these manual processes become painful and/or costly for the customer and/or employees of your company to sustain to maintain the same level of product quality customers have come to expect, your product has become too large (or complete) for your MVP capabilities.

3) The Same Bugs Reappear

In MVP products, new bugs need to be remembered and work around as new updates come out. This method of working through new and old bugs needs to be documented.

In true product development, the same occurrences of repeated bugs are damaging trust. Small failures continue to build up into large failures.

The overall increases in reliability and availability expectations of customers will require engineering discipline and not adding more features.

4) Your Team Is Afraid To Touch Any Part Of The Code

When your engineers respond with “Don’t touch that module”, “Doing this will likely break things”, and “We’ll deal with that later”, your MVP has now become a product, and the technical debt is becoming potentially dangerous.

How The Transition From MVP To Real Product Affects The Company

As the transition to real product completion, the optimization and the focus of efforts do not need to slow down, however the type of effort that needs to be emphasized must change from the initial speed to stable velocity and/or sustainable velocity.

The MVP phase was to “Go Fast; Learn Fast and Break Things In Safe Manner”.

With reaching a “Product Phase”, the emphasis would be to “Get It To Market Reliable and Reduce Regressions. The sustainability of velocity can only be achieved by maintaining a consistent amount of productivity over time”.

Transition #2: From Feature-Based to System-Based

The MVP is purely a features-based product.

Real products include systems-based considerations (the systems of a product) including:

• Architecture
• Data consistency
• Observability
• Security
• Deployment pipelines

Users will not see the impact of these elements, but they are all critical for scaling a product.

Transition #3: From Founder-Centric to Shared Ownership

MVPs rely on a centralized decision-making process led by founders to fill gaps in the product.

In addition to building, these items must also contain:

• Explicit ownership
• Documented decision processes
• Shared knowledge

If these three elements are not present, the product will stop growing beyond the individual.

Transition #4: From Intuition to Measurement

MVPs rely on intuition to drive product decisions.

• Real products rely on:
• Usage statistics
• Activation statistics
• Retention rates
• Failure percentages

Now decisions will be made based on data rather than the opinions of the decision makers.

Things NOT to Do in Making this Transition

Do Not Redo Everything

• Redos:
• Stop momentum
• Introduce new bugs
• Eliminate learning opportunities
• Instead, refactor incrementally.

Do Not Completely Halt Feature Development

Halting all feature development completely will alienate users.

Instead:

• Narrow feature scope
• Focus only on core workflows
• Balance both enhancements and delivery.

Do Not Rush into Enterprise-Level Complexity

Do not introduce complexity in the following areas too early:

Multi-tenancy (including) overbuilding, overly complicated permission structures, compliance workflows that are overly complicated and/or resource heavy.

Introduce complexity only when demand exists.

Transitioning an MVP – Minimum Viable Product: From MVP to Full Product: Use the following transition framework as guidance for moving from the MVP phase to a full product.

Phase 1: Transition to Stable MVP Core

• Identify and remove unwanted bugs.
• Add monitoring features for possible changes/issues after each release.
• Add proper error handling and responses to possible outcomes of errors.
• Implement hardened user journey.

Phase 2: Transition to Incremental Architectures

• Identify and prioritise areas of high risk that have not been modularised.
• Modularise as many areas of architecture as possible.
• Reduce or eliminate dependencies between modules.
• Document your decision-making processes regarding feature development.

Phase 3: Build a Product Culture with a Clear Roadmap with Theme Focus

• Create a clear roadmap/theme for the product rather than a list of features.
• Encourage the team to discuss the trade-offs each team member makes regarding feature prioritisation and development direction.
• Use release metrics and other measured metrics when building a feature.

Phase 4: Prepare for Growth / Scale

• Build for performance testing.
• Build for security baselines within architecture.
• Build for cost visibility and mitigation actions based on perceived levels of risk.
• Build for confidence in deployment and time to deploy your solution.

The purpose of this transition framework is to continue to build momentum and to grow as you develop the product into a full product.

Why Many Products Fail Right After They Achieve MVP Success

It is a sad irony that many products fall into this trap after they have had some early success and are on the verge of creating a full product.

Why do they fall into this trap?

• Because teams confuse the level of interest in a feature with the ability to accomplish the task that feature represents.
• Many teams ignore the architecture of the MVP for too long.
• Many teams build more and more features that continue to add bloat to the solution.
• Most teams do not address the growing debt and complications silently over time.

An MVP does not fail; it is the transition that fails.

Comparison Between MVP and Product Mindset

Goals-MVP vs Product Mindset is the same. The goal of an MVP is to Learn; the goal of a product (once complete) is to Scale.

Scope-Narrow vs Focused but expanding.

Architecture-Temporary vs Evolvable.

User Experience (UX)-Functional vs Reliable and intuitive.

Metrics-Feedback vs Retention and Stability.

Speed-Raw vs Sustainable.

Determining when to shift from MVP to product mindset is truly an acquired skill.

Conclusion

When you launch an MVP, it does not qualify to be considered a real product. A real product is a product when a user has developed a level of dependency towards that product, when revenue expectations become realistic to the user community, reliability becomes an issue to the user community, and the possibility of failure becomes costly to the business.

Because this is a strategic moment, companies must develop an intentional strategy for recognising and addressing the transition from an MVP to a full product so that they can successfully scale their product. Teams that can recognise and manage the transition from MVP to product are typically able to do the following:

• To scale faster than teams that do not recognise and manage the transition.
• To create a final product without the need for extensive and costly rewrites.
• To retain users longer after transitioning to a product.
• To create highly valued and long-lasting products.

Teams that do not recognise and manage the transition end up creating a final product that is created under extreme pressures of a deadline.

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