From MVP to MPO: Minimal Productive Outcome

Minimum Provable Outcome: the smallest real product, workflow, or deployment that produces enough evidence to prove a customer outcome actually happens.

On the one hand, we are still trying to figure out how to bring products to market, which is quite remarkable considering how long we have been doing it. Decades of software startups. In the end, building a company is hard work. Creating a product someone will pay for is near impossible. However, while running a company and selling products is still hard, it has become dramatically easier to develop the software itself. AI-assisted coding tools can now generate tens of thousands of lines of code in a matter of hours or days. Not long ago, that same amount of code would have taken months.1

So, if it’s becoming “easier” (debatable of course) to build products, the real question is: what should we build? This is where the concept of the minimum viable product (MVP) starts to feel…insufficient. The MVP concept is one of the most successful in product development history. Everyone knows what it means. But is it the right one in 2026?

Interestingly, Steve Blank, one of the people most closely associated with establishing MVP as a fundamental startup concept, is now arguing that it may be time to move beyond it. In other words, someone who helped establish the concept is now suggesting it should be replaced.

Old:

“It’s a methodology called the “lean start-up,” and it favors experimentation over elaborate planning, customer feedback over intuition, and iterative design over traditional “big design up front” development. Although the methodology is just a few years old, its concepts—such as “minimum viable product” and “pivoting”—have quickly taken root in the start-up world, and business schools have already begun adapting their curricula to teach them.” - Steve Blank, 2013, https://hbr.org/2013/05/why-the-lean-start-up-changes-everything

New:

“The search for Product/Market fit will become the search for AI Agent/Customer Outcome fit. Minimal Viable Products (MVPs) will become Minimal Productive Outcomes (MPOs.)” - Steve Blank, 2026, https://steveblank.com/2026/03/17/your-startup-is-probably-dead-on-arrival/

So far, it seems that Mr Blank is moving from the concept of a singular, simplistic product initiation to one of experimentation and testing. Based on his writing, entrepreneurs need to build an experimentation system. Not an MVP, but rather a set of tests that generate MPOs in an effort to test many candidate paths quickly. His previous discussion on ‘MVP trees’ hinted at this, and now AI-assisted coding is taking his thinking to a new level, with the traditional interpretation of MVP evolving into a new model for designing the smallest sequence of experiments that tell you what is worth building.

We can not only build one product faster, but also many versions of that product. Then test them. The challenge now is deciding which of our assumptions are worth testing and what proof and outcomes the customer and the company actually need. Instead of focusing on the fastest MVP, we want a process that helps us identify the fastest one that is worth building.

• Minimum means it is still small and focused enough to run quickly.

• Provable means it generates evidence. It should show something measurable.

• Outcome means the point is not the product itself. What can the customer get out of it?

• https://steveblank.com/2026/03/17/your-startup-is-probably-dead-on-arrival/

• https://steveblank.com/2010/03/04/perfection-by-subtraction-the-minimum-feature-set/

• https://steveblank.com/2021/04/20/the-secret-to-the-minimum-viable-product/