I heard this term from Jeff Callan in a recent conversation together with Tatiana Dutra Perez:

“Instead of building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), why not build a Minimum Sellable Product (MSP)?”

The idea is simple: instead of asking what’s the minimum required to validate a hypothesis, the question becomes: what’s the minimum required to sell?

This shift in perspective moves the focus from the feasibility of building a product to the ability to create something that customers are actually willing to pay for.

Back in 2013, I wrote an article called “Go Sell!” where I shared my experience mentoring a startup, a website builder for real estate agents and agencies, that kept insisting on building more features while customers still weren’t buying.

I suggested they try an experiment: stop developing for two weeks and focus 100% on selling. Get on the chat, pick up the phone, and talk to people visiting the site. Leave the comfort zone of product building and face the discomfort of selling.

“The result? In terms of sales volume, it was excellent. In just two weeks, they sold 50% of what they had sold in all previous months combined. But the real win was the learning: they realized that the true problem real estate agents were facing wasn’t having a website — it was generating leads. With that insight, they expanded their portfolio and began offering digital marketing as a service.”

In practice, they discovered their MSP. They figured out what actually sold, and only then went back to building.

What’s curious is that lately I’ve heard of other companies adopting the same approach.

Recently, during a product culture session with the startups at Fisher, a venture builder, I heard a similar story. One of the startups brings not only product people but also engineers into sales conversations with clients. The goal? To hear real feedback, objections, and doubts firsthand, unfiltered, straight from the customer.

What’s most interesting is that this isn’t just for startups.

During my book tour across Europe, I attended the talk “Scaling Against the Odds – The New Product Journey Inside a $2B Giant”, presented by Marija Sivački, Group Product Manager at Infobip, during ProductWorld Europe.

In her talk, Marija shared how Infobip, a Croatian IT and telecommunications company with a valuation exceeding $2 billion and over 3,400 employees, maintains a striking practice. Every product person is responsible for making the first sales of the products they’re building.

The logic is clear: if the people building the product can’t sell it in the earliest conversations with potential customers, maybe it’s not ready to be built.

In conclusion

MVPs have their value, but they often validate only our ability to build, not our ability to sell.

The shift in perspective that MSP proposes is powerful: start with the market, not with the product.

Maybe viability is just too vague. Viable for what? To build? To showcase internally? To present to potential clients?

Sellable gets straight to the point: what’s the minimum product we need to build in order to sell?

Workshops, coaching, and advisory services

I’ve been helping companies and their leaders (CPOs, heads of product, CTOs, CEOs, tech founders, and heads of digital transformation) bridge the gap between business and technology through workshops, coaching, and advisory services on product management and digital transformation.

Digital Product Management Books

Do you work with digital products? Do you want to know more about managing a digital product to increase its chances of success, solve its user’s problems, and achieve the company objectives? Check out my Digital Product Management books, where I share what I learned during my 30+ years of experience in creating and managing digital products:

• Digital transformation and product culture: How to put technology at the center of your company’s strategy
• Leading Product Development: The art and science of managing product teams
• Product Management: How to increase the chances of success of your digital product
• Startup Guide: How startups and established companies can create profitable digital products