As a product guy, minimum viable product is one important method with which to organize product development efforts, and to maximize the amount of benefit derived from scarce engineering, development, and management resources. In agile development circles, Product Owners work with the team to consciously choose to release “MVPs” frequently, or release a bunch of them together in an integrated package or manner. My take is that “minimum viable product” is the set of features that satisfy the core needs of your target champion audience and provides the team with the greatest return in both actionable feedback and revenue/revenue potential. More than one can go live at a time!

To work backwards a little, agile development and Scrum in particular derive big benefits from thinking in this manner. The reason being that minimum viable product first forces you to think about a set of features, functionality, and fixes that make sense together, and offer your users the greatest benefit. Then, once you arrange things into a bundle, you look for areas where it’s possible to make them bite-sized for the team to work with and to execute on. Let’s say that you end up with 3 minimal viable “products”; that may simply correlate to three distinct milestone dates throughout a calendar year. But not all of them have to go to market immediately, not all of them have to be released as soon as they’re individually done!

Oftentimes, the driving force for product people to tie one minimum viable product to a release is the urge to get something to market ASAP. I say that you ought to resist that urge with all your might! It’s not about the “smallest kernel of your core idea” but rather, how you help your team build a great product iteration that goes to market successfully. It is up to the product folks to exercise some discipline and patience about what exactly constitutes minimum viable product. Anticipating how your users will be delighted by a single button versus a single experience makes all the difference in the world.

In conclusion, for all you product folks out there: Minimum viable product is the set of features that satisfy the core needs of your target champion audience and provides the team with the greatest return in both actionable feedback and revenue/revenue potential. Bundle multiple MVPs if you think the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

The real question is “What has changed that raised the FDA’s inept ire?”. General Mills has been making this claim for more than a decade, but the FDA never seemed to have a problem before. I think it is safe to assume that every member of that organization should have been exposed to some form of Cheerios advertising or perhaps consumes the cereal themselves, so I’m not so sure that ‘new developments’ would be a sufficient answer to give.

As a business analyst, I can only hope that recent organizational changes have been made to better carry out the part of the FDA’s stated mission of

“helping the public get the accurate, science-based information they need to use medicines and foods to improve their health”

and a division of the FDA is now devoted to media monitoring activities. Otherwise, this is a sad indictment on the government’s state of affairs, which highlights ineptitude, lack of awareness/relevance, and an inability to enforce real change.

Recommendation: Just as many companies’ PR divisions monitor a myriad of media channels to ensure that their brand is secure, so too should the FDA ensure that their “enforcement activites” have actual consequences by enabling or building a Media division that covers radio, television, Web, and print channels (and more in the future with the maturing of the mobile channel and other platforms as well). The Media division would then be a “first line of defense” to pick up these claims, acting as a public rights advocate and triage expert by:

• acting as a first responder to marketing claims as soon as they are published in the wider mediums,
• queuing up severe violations in a prioritized fashion and publishing this list on some government publication medium,
• creating marketing guidelines on language and visuals for the layman marketer and business owner to follow, and
• making all of this transparent to the public.

The public should be confident about the FDA and how they are in fact doing their job, and considering that the FDA is funded by tax dollars, we should demand efficacy.