This means building a minimum viable product

It’s the smallest ‘thing’ we think could be valuable to our members, our customers or other users.

We then grow that thing based on the feedback we get from real use, by real people.

We want the most meaningful feedback and to do that, the product that users see must be real.

if we release loads of features at the same time it becomes difficult to work out which part of what we built was useful and which bits weren’t.

If our end goal was making a new kind of wedding cake, we might first test with a simple cupcake.

We’d include just enough features to maximise our learning.

We could get it into people’s hands so they could taste it and we could check the flavours and uncover any problems in our factory.

we could then iterate quickly, safe in the knowledge we have the right ingredients and that our oven works, and so on.

At each iteration we are providing value to the customer (cake to eat) and value to the business (cake to sell).

We’d do that rather than try to build the wedding cake straight away.

In other words, building an MVP is about doing the least to learn the most.

Starting small means we can get a tangible product in front of users quickly, and start to observe, analyse and measure quantitatively and qualitatively.

Getting started as soon as possible helps us quickly create a feedback loop that can prove or disprove our ideas for how to improve the product.