A minimum viable product is the smallest thing you can build that a real user can get real value from — the point of which is to learn. It exists to test the riskiest assumption in an idea against reality as cheaply as possible, before large amounts of time and money are committed to the full vision.
The word doing the work is "viable". An MVP is not a broken or unfinished product; it is a deliberately narrow but genuinely useful one. Getting that scope right — enough to be worth using, little enough to ship and learn from quickly — is the actual skill, and it is easy to get wrong in both directions.
Related terms