Launch in two weeks: thoughts on agile Minimum Marketable Features

A Minimum Marketable Feature is a small, self-contained feature that can be developed quickly, and delivers significant value to the user.

An agile culture strives to deliver incremental value to customers regularly.

An essential tool to do this is the Minimum Marketable Feature: a forcing function for product development that focuses on what’s crucial, a specific pain that addresses customers’ needs. It’s also a test: an MMF validates that the need genuinely exists and is sufficiently strong to stir interest for new customers.

By locking the timeline – say, every few weeks – and flexing on scope, thinking about a Minimum Marketable Feature focuses attention on both the product and the process of launching:

Make it production worthy: a two-week timebox is as much a test of launch and support as it is a tool to refine the scope of the feature. Launching regularly improves the launch process, which gets easier over time thanks to experience, removing bottlenecks, and automation.

Ensure it inspires pride: an MMF shouldn’t be a hacky or shoddy bit of work. Executed properly, it’s a perfect fit for a customer’s need and is the basis for ongoing experimentation and testing.

Work to capture joy: even something minimal can capture joy. Consider the “unsubscribe” feature on newsletters. I’ve been greeted with an immediate unsubscribe, my email already submitted, a thank you, and a farewell: a small act of kindness that makes me deeply grateful. Wordle is a fairly complex game, but it took off once it implemented a simple sharing mechanism that supported friends playing together.

What techniques have you used to ship something valuable in a short amount of time?