The minimum viable product is one of the most useful concepts in the history of product development and one of the most consistently misapplied. In its original framing, the MVP is the smallest possible thing that can generate real learning from real users — not a prototype, not a demo, not a landing page with a waitlist, but something with enough function that a real person would use it for a real purpose and produce real behavioral data as a result. The concept is rigorous, empirical, and demanding. What it became in practice is a permission slip to ship things that don’t work.