MVP vs MMF - What is the Difference? - Mike Cohn

MVP vs MMF - What is the Difference? - Mike Cohn

I had a question come up in a recent Better User Stories webinar. We were talking about story mapping and the concept of setting a significant objective for a period of time (usually about a quarter).
I gave three examples of how to come up with a significant objective: An MMF (minimum marketable feature), an MVP (minimum viable product), or a WIG (wildly important goal).
At the end, someone asked me if I could further explain the difference between an MVP and an MMF. I wanted to share the answer with you in case this has come up on your team.
What’s an MVP?
An MVP is about the whole product. ​​Product is in the name: Minimum Viable Product. The term MVP comes from Eric Ries and his book The Lean Startup.
An MVP is the version of a product that delivers the maximum amount of information for the least amount of effort. An MVP is designed to validate the idea of a product as a whole: Is this product something people will pay for?
I have a bit of an issue with using an MVP for a significant objective. Why? Because when you meet again to plan, what do you build next?
You've already released something minimum and viable. Whatever comes next is more than minimum and viable. So how can you call it an MVP? It feels as if you can only use the term once.
I tend to prefer the term MMF, minimum marketable feature.
What’s an MMF?
An MMF is about a single feature rather than the whole product. A minimum marketable feature is a subset of an overall feature, one that delivers value when released independently. It was introduced by Mark Denne and Jane Cleland-Huang in their book Software by Numbers.
That is, the MMF is not everything you may ultimately want in the feature, but it's enough to get some feedback.
In a spell checker, for example, you may release a version that checks your spelling but doesn't allow users to share custom dictionaries or do other things you know you eventually want. But you've released enough to market that your spell checker includes that feature.
What’s the Difference?
A minimum marketable feature is smaller than a minimum viable product. An MVP can and likely would include multiple MMFs.
For example, suppose I’m building an ecommerce website.
I might have the following requirements: ​​
 

• I can search for items
• I can put items in a cart
• I can pay for items
• I can set delivery addresses

That set of features would be an MVP: I could launch my ecommerce site with those features. An MMF, on the other hand, would be a way to deliver part of any one of those features.
Let’s say we want an MMF for “I can pay for items.” We want to be able to launch that feature in the coming period but decide to launch it in a minimal way first, maybe for capacity reasons or maybe because we want to learn something about it before we create a bunch of functionality.
So we would take the feature “I want to pay for an item” and identify a minimum marketable feature: “I can pay for an item with Mastercard.” It’s not a whole product. It’s not even a full feature. But it is enough to get us going.
Whether you prefer to think about MVPs, MMFs, or something else, focusing teams towards a significant objective and mapping the stories that will get you there, will help you and your team succeed with agile.

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