Benjamin Yoskovitz

he Minimum Viable Product is the smallest thing you can build that will create the value you’ve promised to your market. But nowhere in that definition does it say how much of that offering has to be real. If you’re considering building a ride-sharing service, for example, you can try to connect drivers and passengers the old-fashioned way: by hand.
This is a concierge approach. It recognizes that sometimes, building a product—even a minimal one—isn’t worth the investment. The risk you’re investigating is, “Will people accept rides from others?” It’s emphatically not, “Can I build software to match drivers and passengers?” A Concierge MVP won’t scale, but it’s fast and easy in the short term.

Having a full-featured free product might reduce sales, but having a crippled product might reduce new users. You need a metric that combines the two, so you can understand how changes affect overall health. Otherwise, you might do something that increases sales revenue at the expense of growth.

Whenever you look at a metric, ask yourself, “What will I do differently based on this information?” If you can’t answer that question, you probably shouldn’t worry about the metric too much. And if you don’t know which metrics would change your organization’s behavior, you aren’t being data-driven. You’re floundering in data quicksand.