MVP Vs. MMP Vs. MMF

In recent times, Agile industries have been blooming as it provides solutions to various problems faced by companies with traditional software methodologies. With the advent of Agile Methodology, many terms have confused individuals such as Minimum Viable Product, Minimum Marketable Product, Minimum Marketable Features, and many more. Many people use these terms interchangeably and do not know the differences between them. All of these terms are quite different from each other although they have referred to the product developed in the initial stage of the product development. Often, people think about minimum business increment (MBI) and mistake it for MVP, MMF, or MMP. One has to know that though they are closely related concepts with similar names, they interpret different aspects of the developing product. This article aims to clear the confusion created between these terms and explains how each of the terms is different from one another. 

1. Minimum Viable Product

The Minimum Viable Product (MVP) concept is central to the Lean Startup methodology introduced by Eric Ries. An MVP is the simplest product version that allows you to test a business idea with the least effort, time, and resources. The core goal of an MVP is to validate assumptions about your product by launching a basic version and collecting feedback from real customers.

An MVP is a product developed with the minimum features necessary to meet the needs of early adopters. It's not about launching a perfect or fully featured product but about learning as much as possible while spending as little. The MVP helps you determine if there is a product-market fit before committing significant resources to complete development.

Core Purpose of an MVP

The primary purpose of an MVP is to test assumptions. Instead of building a fully-fledged product, the MVP allows businesses to release a miniature, functional version of their idea to test the market, gather feedback, and make informed decisions. This early feedback loop ensures that you create something that customers want, not just something you think they want.

MVP in Action: An Example

For instance, imagine you want to develop an online platform for freelancers. Rather than building a complex system with various features, an MVP is a landing page with a sign-up option and a basic description of the platform's concept. You can drive traffic to the page and measure interest through sign-ups or other forms of engagement. This approach minimizes initial investment while providing valuable insights into whether your idea has potential.

Benefits of an MVP

• Faster Time to Market: The MVP focuses on minimal features so that it can be launched much quicker than a full-fledged product.
• Cost-Effective: It reduces the initial development cost by focusing only on core features.
• Risk Reduction: By validating assumptions early, the MVP helps you avoid the risk of developing a product that the market doesn’t need or want.
• Customer Insights: MVPs gather honest user feedback, allowing you to refine the product according to customer needs.

When to Build an MVP?

Building an MVP makes sense when you're entering an uncertain market or unsure about your idea’s viability. It helps you test your hypothesis about the market, gauge customer interest, and adapt quickly based on the feedback you receive.

2. Minimal Marketable Product

The Minimal Marketable Product (MMP) concept encourages businesses to focus on delivering the smallest viable offering that can still provide value to users. It revolves around the idea that sometimes, less is more. By focusing on a limited number of key features, businesses can release a product that resonates with early adopters and innovators who value quality and function over quantity. MMP aims to deliver a marketable product quickly, allowing businesses to market faster, gain traction, and generate returns sooner.

What is an MMP?

An MMP is the version of your product containing the minimum set of features that can provide users value and be marketed. These features are carefully chosen to differentiate your product from the competition, ensuring the offering stands out in a crowded market. Unlike the MVP, which focuses primarily on testing and gathering feedback, the MMP is designed to be a more polished version ready for the market, offering real value to customers from the start.

The Benefits of an MMP

The most obvious benefit of an MMP is the reduced time-to-market. By focusing on only a handful of essential features, you can launch the product more quickly, and with the right features, it can immediately provide value. An MMP also allows for a faster return on investment (ROI). Since the product can be sold earlier, you can generate revenue much sooner. Additionally, businesses focusing on delivering an MMP can avoid the pitfalls of over-engineering their product, leading to unnecessary costs, longer development cycles, and cluttered offerings.

Overcoming the Temptation to Over-Engineer

In today’s fast-paced tech world, there’s often a temptation to add as many features as possible to a product. It’s easy to get carried away and want to match or outdo competitors by adding every possible functionality. However, this approach can backfire. When businesses over-engineer their products, they risk creating a bloated offering that adds complexity, increases maintenance costs, and ultimately dilutes the product's core value. The key is to focus on a small set of high-impact features that will make a real difference to your target users.

The Apple iPhone Example: A Classic MMP

A great example of a Minimal Marketable Product is the original 2007 iPhone. At its release, the iPhone lacked many features that its competitors already offered. It didn’t support POP email integration, had no copy-paste option, and didn’t have video capabilities. Despite these missing features, the iPhone became a massive success. This success was driven by a laser focus on key features that differentiated the iPhone from the competition, such as the touch interface and sleek design. Apple’s goal with the original iPhone was not to cater to everyone but to create a product appealing to a specific group of early adopters.

Using MVP to Discover Key Features for MMP

Before creating an MMP, companies can use an MVP to identify the most important features to users. The MVP helps you validate which aspects of your product matter most and which features will provide the most value. By focusing on these key features, you can build an MMP that offers the right balance of innovation and simplicity, ensuring your product stands out in the market while meeting customer needs.

The concept of minimum marketable feature is a subset of Minimum Marketable Product as it says that a small and self-contained feature that is built quickly and delivers value to users could be used as a tool to sell or market the product. This term is generally not in practice as it comes under MMP, however, most of the Agile industries constantly emphasize delivering value in the form of features to the product. The early and continuous delivery of valuable software is the product features developed by the Agile developers and which are added to the product as an increment. The feature that you add to the product should help your customers or users to perform a certain task which they were not able to do before. Both external and internal products use the concept of MMF as it includes several ways of protecting and increasing revenue, reducing and avoiding costs. Hence, the idea of MMF is that any feature which is self-sustained and small, and that which could be easily developed could be marketed or sold to promote and sell the product. 

Benefits of Using MMF

One of MMF's significant benefits is its ability to reduce development time while driving real impact. Because the feature is small and self-contained, it can be developed and launched more quickly than larger, more complex features. This rapid development cycle allows businesses to gain market traction faster by delivering value to users early and consistently.

Additionally, by focusing on a minor feature, businesses can test and validate its effectiveness with users before committing significant resources to more complex, prominent features. This helps to minimize risk and ensures that each new feature is truly valuable to the customer.

MMF in Agile Development

In Agile development, features are delivered in small increments, allowing continuous feedback and improvement. MMF is vital in this process as the building block for Agile development cycles. Instead of waiting for a fully completed product, Agile teams can focus on delivering single, focused features that contribute to the overall product.

For example, an MMF may be a feature that enables users to upload images in an app. While it may seem like a small addition, it significantly enhances the user experience, allowing users to complete tasks they could not have done previously. This type of feature can be developed, tested, and released quickly, and it adds immediate value.

MMP vs MVP

The Minimum Viable Product is very different from a Minimum Marketable Product but still, many professionals get confused between the two. MVP is a product purely made for understanding the behavior of the customers and to know what type of functionality is expected in the market. Using fake ads to see several clicks or to just develop products to get feedback without using much effort are examples of Minimum Viable Products. The Minimum Marketable Product, on the other hand, is the smallest amount of functionality that the business can deliver without having the compulsion of learning anything about the product viability. The primary goal of the MMP is to earn and sell the product where the team considers building features that will satisfy the needs of the customers. The MVP is not an accurate product and does not provide a proper assessment of whether the customers will use the product. However, it could be used to assess the reach of the product and also get feedback for the product to make it better. You should be aware that Developers can change a Minimum Viable Product to something completely different than they planned initially depending on the feedback of the customers They can also abandon the entire product if no customer wants that product. This saves an enormous amount of money as the MVP did not take much effort or amount in building it, but if the business built a product that nobody wanted, they would have incurred heavy losses. 

MVP begins with a hypothesis that a targeted set of customers would want a particular product and the team works together to build a product that would satisfy their needs. The team builds MVP and releases it to the market and checks whether the hypothesis is true and customers require the product. The results of this experiment would show whether they have to work more on the product if the customers are interested or if they have to abandon the project. Also, the results give the information of all features to be added to the product to make it valuable. 

MVP vs MMF

Most professionals confuse MVP with MMF as they may sound similar and have similar definitions. However, one has to understand that MVP is about learning about the product which is going to be developed. In a Minimum Viable Product, there could be several MMFs, or a single MMF or no MMFs. MMF is the least effort feature which is small and self-sustained and could be sold in the market. Both MVP and MMF are not the same concepts, but both of them imply that a minimum functionality should be accomplished to gain a specific outcome. You also have to know that many Agile communities interchange the terms of MMP, MMF, and MRF.  

When you can identify the marketable features of your product which is self-sustained, and those features that can perform well in the market, you can prioritize the releases of those features which would help you learn and earn simultaneously. On your first feature, you would be able to gain a good amount for your features; you could also work on your other features subsequently. These features can be broken down into user stories if they are large and can be delivered in multiple iterations along with feedback for each iteration. 

One problem with confusing MMF and MVP is that if you treat your minimum marketable feature as a Minimum Viable Product, you would not be able to earn any returns as you are ignoring the marketable part in the MMF. If the team only wants to deliver features without considering whether revenue would be earned, then there would be problems in business. The product delivered may not have the required quality to generate returns and the company may incur losses. 

Conclusion

In today's world of complex project building and management, every product starts with an MVP, MMP, and MMF. There would be a big-time confusion if you are mixing all of these terms. The Minimum Viable Product is a product mainly aimed to learn about the behavior of the users and customers and does not have an earning component. If necessary when the product does not receive any responses as hypothesized, then the product could be completely abandoned. The Minimum Marketable Product is a product that is developed with minimum effort to make money for the business. The MMF is a part of MMP where the self-sustained and small features are identified and integrated into the product. These features are marketable and would satisfy the needs of the customer. Hence, next time you come across these terms, pay attention to the context they are being used and use them accordingly.