MVPs appeared back in the lean startup days. It was a hacky method taken by entrepreneurs to prove whether a business model was even viable.
One thing they all had in common is that the founders had an idea for something that they were not really sure was going to work.
They created a minimum viable product to test whether the product idea was even viable to build a company around it in the first place.
It was called a product, but it was usually an experiment that would assess whether a crazy idea even had legs to stand on in the first place.
The catch is the Lean Startup book became the bible for product, the way product teams should operate. If they were not operating in that particular way, they would die. If they did, they had a chance.
The attractiveness of being able to prove something quickly, combined with the popularity of the book, meant that MVPs became the standard way of approaching the beginnings of an idea.
If you're shipping something and the first version of that is not a minimum viable version of that product, you're doing something wrong. Very wrong.
Well, I disagree.
If all you're doing is building the minimum viable version of a product that only works, how are we going to know if that's desirable? It just doesn't work.
Viability doesn't equal desirability.
And you're looking to understand whether a product is desirable by the customer, not viable.
Luckily, many other companies have taken care of this. Famous was Amazon, which was the first one to coin the term MLP (minimum lovable product). More recently I've heard Elena Verna from Lovable saying they also approach product by thinking about minimum lovable product rather than viable.
The idea is very very simple: you want to start with something that your customer would actually desire so that you can evaluate on whether it is actually worth it investing more time and resource into this idea.
You won't know that by building the simplest viable version. The world is too complex for that.
If you're ever in a position where you're able to decide what the scope should be or you have enough proof to stand your ground on why desirability is better than viability (it is), do so.
Great products are made out of solving a small amount of problems well. Not superficially solving a wide number of them.
Less, but better.