Going to Market: Prototype vs. PoC vs. MVP

Your company is ready to launch a new product—innovation is in the air!

As the team looks to you for direction and stakeholders set their sights on hitting their KPIs, customers remain blissfully unaware of what’s to come. It’s your job to make sure everything goes smoothly —delivering value to your business, your team, and most importantly, your customers.

This means you have to make right decisions. That’s risky business, as you can’t predict the future (don’t worry no one does) so it’s hard to know what will work and what not.

So, how do you minimize risks as you prepare to go to market?

“Let’s start with an MVP.”

“We should prototype it first.”

“Let’s build a proof of concept.”

But here’s where it gets tricky. Your stakeholders are expecting a market-ready product to sell to eager customers, while your team might thinking about sketching ideas on a napkin. These terms often get mixed up, or people have very different interpretation of them.

This confusion likely stems from their somewhat similar objectives: to test and validate product ideas, incrementally de-risking the go-to-market process through learning and iteration before fully committing time, resources, and money.

But it’s important to understand the distinct roles each concept plays in validating critical dimensions of desirability, feasibility, and viability that any product should have, and mitigating associated risks.

Prototype

A prototype is an early sample, model, or release of a product built to test a concept or process. It's a visualization tool for how the product will function or appear, used to gather user feedback and refine the concept. Prototypes can range from simple sketches to interactive simulations that closely resemble the final product, making them a fast, cost-effective method to test desirability and answer questions like:

• Will customers like it?
• Can users understand how it works?
• Does it solve the customer's problem?

At Design Sprint Academy we use design sprints to develop and test prototypes.

PoC - Proof of Concept

Once there is confidence in desirability, it's time to commit more resources to build a PoC. This is primarily used to verify that a certain concept or aspect of the product can be developed, focusing on proving the feasibility of the idea. It’s particularly important if the product relies on new technologies like AI or complicated, specialized technical implementations. A PoC is typically developed to a point where it can be shared internally but is not usually exposed to external users. It answers questions like:

• Can this be built on our current tech stack?
• Is integration with external systems feasible?
• Will the solution scale effectively?

An example could be creating a chatbot using generative AI combined with proprietary company data to demonstrate that AI can replicate human-like customer support.

MVP - Minimum Viable Product

Ultimately, a product must be viable—customers should be willing to pay for it. This is what the MVP is for. An MVP is a pared-down version of a product that includes just enough (essential) features to attract early adopters and validate the business model. It's market-ready, albeit minimal, and tests viability by gathering feedback from real users:

• Can we sell it?
• Can we monetize it?
• Can we support our customers?

You can do them in sequence, as shown in the diagram below. But you can chose to do one or another depending the stage you are at. If feasibility is more important, start with a PoC. If you are not sure how customers will react to your proposition start with a prototype.Starting directly with an MVP is something I seldom recommend—based on my 15 years of experience in my first (software developemnt) company, taking this route led to failure in 90% of cases, and those were costly missteps.

Whatever you do, one thing is not optional: product validation.

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