Prototype vs PoC vs MVP - How Product Leaders Choose
Are you a non-technical product leader looking to understand the difference and how to choose based on which you need right now?
Proofs of Concept (PoCs) are used to validate technical feasibility
Proofs of Concept (PoCs) are used to validate technical feasibility of solving a specific, well defined problem.
Engineering uses PoCs before building the full feature.
Prototypes are used to visualise user journeys
Prototypes are clickable smoke-and-mirrors used to visually demonstrate the flow of your product.
Use it to get quick and early feedback from customer conversations.
Built with design tools like Figma or frontend code (often plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript).
No need to connect to a backend or database.
Prototypes are not made to ship to customers.
MVPs are shipped to deliver incremental value to customers in the real-world
MVPs are used to deliver the smallest increment of value to customers to solve a problem.
MVPs are built to be shipped to customers.
Different approaches to MVP code quality based on Product-Market Fit (PMF) and your appetite for risk
If you have a high-risk idea and low certainty that the product will exist in this form a year from now,
Then build it cheap and dirty so you don’t burn through your budget.
Benefit is that if you don’t find PMF, you’ll have more budget to try again.
Risk is that if you find PMF, you’ll have to throw away your MVP codebase because it doesn’t scale and rebuild it using the knowledge you acquire.
This is a great problem to have as a startup because finding PMF is hard.
If you have a low-risk idea and an established idea and you’re using your MVP as a way of incrementally delivering the first slice of value in the least time,
And you’re confident you’re not going to fundamentally pivot this product in the near future,
Then spend engineering capacity building a robust and scalable MVP since you’ll want to keep the codebase in the future and simply add additional phases of functionality to it.