minimum-viable-productHypothetical situation: You release an MVP of a software product, and gain a few early adopters. Being an MVP, there are issues with your product that you quickly learn about so you plan changes or new features. As you continue to iterate, your product changes significantly.
Presumably most customers will be happy as the product is better, but some may be perfectly comfortable with the MVP workflow. Is this often an issue? If so, should one be more cautious with changes to the product (at the expense of the product’s quality) or continue to make major changes to improve the product (at the expense of the customer base)? How does one find a balance?
I generally wouldn’t worry to much.
While it is true that customers hate changes that make them feel stupid there is really no way to avoid making changes early in product discovery.
Remember that pivots happen around markets as well as product features. So one of the reasons that early customers may dislike change is that they’re actually not in your market any more.
If losing those early customers is going to be too painful for the company, then that raises questions about whether the totally addressable market is large enough to sustain you in the longer term.
You’re not (I assume) planning to make random changes. You’re planning to make changes that address particular problems people have raised, or to validate new hypothesis you have formed about your product and market. In the former case customers should generally be happier that pain points disappear. In the latter you need to experiment to make progress.
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