Wizard of Oz MVP

In Wizard of Oz MVP, we present what appears to the end user as a fully functional product, but behind the scenes, it’s just people doing the work. The most famous example of this is Zappos (then called the Shoesite). Like any good Lean startup, they needed to test their riskiest assumptions: Would anyone buy shoes online? You can’t test the fit, feel, or quality of shoes online. Rather than spend millions and millions of dollars to build a fulfillment center, Zappos put up a website that sold shoes. Instead of maintaining an inventory warehouse or building a fulfillment system, the founder, Tony Hsieh, fulfilled orders manually by shopping at local stores.

Airbnb is another example: the founders visited the homes of early hosts, took professional photos, and uploaded and listed them on their website. When a guest booked a stay, the founders handled the details in the background.

In both of these examples, the founders are testing the riskiest assumptions: Is it safe to buy or rent over the internet?

Wizard of Oz Key Elements

  • Process: Build a realistic front end of the product, but leave out the back end. Iterate quickly, as we see how people use the product. Key: to the end user, it appears realistic.
  • When to use it: You can use Wizard of Oz with any type of audience. If you can get people to use your application, you learn from them. It is best suited to problems that can tolerate a delay for the manual process on the back end.
  • Measurement: Anything you would normally measure in a live product. At its core, does the user buy, rent, or take the key action?

Wizard of Oz is a genuinely useful place to use GenAI. You’re building a lightweight front end whose only job is to learn. You don’t worry about technical debt; this is an experiment.

Pros and Cons of the Wizard of Oz

Pros: Cheap, cheerful

Cons: Maintaining consistency is hard when doing repetitive tasks manually. It’s not scalable; if you’re overwhelmed with demand early on, you might need to shut the door temporarily and build the real application. Please remember you built throw-away code. Don’t build on top of it.

Wizard of Oz is one type of Minimum Viable Product, and it is one of my favourite MVP techniques.

Resource Links

Explainer Video MVP
Minimum Viable Product [MVP]
Lean Startup
Lean Startup Experiments
Fake Door MVP

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