The minimum marketable release (MMR) is the full commercial release of merchandise that gratifies existing user requirements. An MMR is utilized to cut the preliminary time-to-market.
Popular products are installed increasingly into the market with passing time and every “chief” disposition is being mentioned as a commercial release or installation.
An MMR is the discharge of merchandise that has the minimum conceivable feature clan that discourses the existing desires of the wide customer base.
MMRs are utilized to cut the time-to-market amid discharges by decreasing the intelligible feature clan of every commercial discourse to the least augmentation that bids new worth to clients/end users.
A release of a product that has the smallest possible feature set — the smallest increment that offers new value to users and addresses their current needs.
Successful products are deployed incrementally into the marketplace over time, each “major” deployment being referred to as a release.
An MMR is the release of a product that has the smallest possible feature set that addresses the current needs of your customers.
MMRs are used to reduce the time-to-market between releases by reducing the coherent feature set of each release to the smallest increment that offers new value to customers/end users.
Minimum Marketable Release as Unit of Work
Strictly speaking, the MMR should not be considered as a work item per se, but rather as a collection — a batch — of work items. An MMR will contain several work items (user stories, use cases, features or whatever you are used to).
The size of an MMR will vary for two reasons. First, and most important, is that each MMR can contain a different number of work items. The second is that each work item will belong to a different class of service, each characterized by a different (average) size.
While an MMR is not a work item, from a risk management perspective it becomes interesting to consider it as a unit of work. We will consider the MMR as a unit of work that is released into the workflow, and not only as a unit of value that is released to the market once finished.
MMR as a Fixed Scope Mini Project
The MMR can be considered as a fixed scope unit of work and unit of marketable value, to be delivered in its entirety. No more, no less.
Here the emphasis is on Fixed Scope: you cannot change an MMR’s scope, less the very purpose of identifying the MMR in the first place becomes vain.
When using MMRs, we cannot have a variable scope: we must deal with variable time instead!
This is where we start to see the connection with the buffer management techniques of Critical Chain Project Management: the Theory of Constraints teaches how to live with varying times through buffer management.
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