Ever since learning about Lean Startup, I’ve greatly appreciated the concept of the Minimal Viable Product (MVP). Before the Lean methodology was introduced, startups traditionally invested lots of time and money to bring their concept to market. Too often, after making that big investment, founders then realized that people didn’t really want their product, at least not the way they had envisioned it. The MVP approach says that, instead of working long and hard to launch the perfect product, you instead quickly launch the least costly version of the concept that can prove out the assumptions behind the value proposition. Get it into customers’ hands and learn from them what they like and what they don’t. Make adjustments and try again. Continue to iterate until your product meets the needs of a specific market.
But, over the years, I’ve encountered startups where taking the MVP approach is really hard. In his book “The Digital Transformation Playbook”, David L. Rogers provides a simple framework, “Four Paths to Scaling Up”, which not only brings clarity to why an MVP approach works well sometimes and not others, but can also help in making decisions as you are innovating to maximize your opportunity to learn and iterate.
At the core of the framework is a 2×2 matrix defined by two key questions. In the article linked below, I explain these two questions, each of the four paths, and how innovators can effectively use the two questions to reverse engineer an approach to innovation where an MVP approach is most likely to succeed.