In Jim Brikman’s post A Minimum Viable Product Is Not a Product, It’s a Process he explains the real purpose of following an MVP approach:

An MVP is a process that you repeat over and over again: Identify your riskiest assumption, find the smallest possible experiment to test that assumption, and use the results of the experiment to course correct.

When you build a product, you make many assumptions. You assume you know what users are looking for, how the design should work, what marketing strategy to use, what architecture will work most efficiently, which monetization strategy will make it sustainable, and which laws and regulations you have to comply with. No matter how good you are, some of your assumptions will be wrong. The problem is, you don’t know which ones.

And the crux:

The only way to find that out—the only way to test your assumptions—is to put your product in front of real users as quickly as possible. And when you do, you will often find that you have to go back to the drawing board. In fact, you’ll have to go back to the drawing board not just once, but over and over again.

This is one of the major problems with MVP-thinking as I see it in many organizations today. For many product managers MVP is unfortunately not a learning process, but just a fancy way of saying “v1”. And as we all know, the biggest lie in the enterprise world is “v1”. There’s never a v2. So many hide behind the “MVP” moniker to obscure the fact that they just want to get a thing out the door and move on. We’d do well to remind our teams that the real purpose of an MVP is to learn, not to complete.