Minimum Viable Product doesn't mean half finished.

Minimum Viable Product: build a slice across instead of one layer at a time.

The Lean Startup movement challenges the assumption that customers must have all imaginable features available in a product before they will start to use it.
Eric Ries coined the term minimum viable product (MVP) to describe a strategy of investing a minimal amount of resources to test the underlying assumptions of our hypotheses with customers.
The objective is to eliminate the waste generated by over engineered solutions and accelerate our learning by testing a solution with early customers as soon as possible.

An MVP enables us to use a minimum amount of effort to generate the maximum amount of learning when experimenting with customers. Therefore, it is important to distinguish between an MVP in Eric Ries’ sense and the initial public release of a product, which increasingly takes the form of a public “beta” (Figure 4-5).

Confusingly, people often refer to any validation activity anywhere along on this spectrum as an MVP, overloading the term and understanding of it in the organisation or wider industry.
Marty Cagan, author of Inspired: How to Create Products Customers Love and ex-SVP for eBay, notably uses the term “MVP test” to refer to what Eric Ries calls an MVP.
Cagan defines an MVP as “the smallest possible product that has three critical characteristics: people choose to use it or buy it; people can figure out how to use it; and we can deliver it when we need it with the resources available—also known as valuable, usable, and feasible” to which “delightful” can be added, since design and aesthetics are also as essential for an MVP as for a finished product, as shown in the figure.

Make sure that your team and stakeholders are clear on their definition of MVP.

(original article published on tangleblog.wordpress.com)