The Wizard of Oz MVP: All Style, No Substance

Getting to market quickly is key when launching a new startup. The eternal problem? Development takes time. Going from idea to product can take ages if you do it properly.

So how do you fix this? You cheat strategically.

There’s always a desire to launch something perfect, but in the rapidly shifting world of startups, ‘perfect’ usually means ‘too late.’ In most cases, there’s more value in having an imperfect product in front of users that you can learn from than in delivering something polished months after the window of opportunity has closed.

If you’re waiting to push out a perfect product you’ve waited too long

What is the Wizard of Oz MVP?

One way to shortcut development and still deliver something testable is to use the Wizard of Oz MVP approach. If you’re familiar with the film, you’ll get the gist: something flashy and convincing up front, with a lot of smoke and mirrors backstage.

The Wizard of Oz MVP is a classic move in lean user experience because it lets you trial ideas without building them all the way. It’s the art of faking it just enough to get real feedback. Users think they’re interacting with a functioning product, but what’s actually happening behind the curtain is manual, messy, and very human.

It’s a technique that gets you a signal fast, without burning budget on back-end infrastructure.

How does it work?

Fully developed products rely on automation. Sign-ups, personalisation, onboarding, notifications, all of it’s handled by code.

But when you’re in MVP mode, you don’t have the luxury of time or a big engineering team. So instead of building the system, you become the system.

Let’s say you’ve built a concept for a cooking site, CookSmart. Users fill in a form: what ingredients they like, their dietary needs, and what’s in the fridge. You promise to send them personalised recipe emails every week.

In a real product, this would all be automated. Data would be written to a database, an algorithm would match recipes to preferences, and the whole thing would run on autopilot.

The tech required for this isn’t the most complex thing ever but it would take some time to put together.

But in a Wizard of Oz MVP, you skip all of that. The form just dumps the data into a spreadsheet. Someone on the team goes through it and hand-picks recipes for each user. Maybe the emails are written one by one. Maybe it’s copy-paste. It’s not scalable, but it works.

The tech required for this is nothing more than a web form which can be coded in a few minutes.

Users will never know

The number one worry: what if users find out it’s all duct tape and elbow grease?

Here’s the good news: they won’t. Or at least, not if you do the surface right.

Users care about outcomes. If they get their promised recipes every week, they’re happy. They don’t know or care whether an algorithm sent it or someone named Sam in customer support.

That’s the point of the Wizard of Oz MVP. You put your energy into making the front-end convincing, clean UI, smooth UX, and tight messaging. As long as you deliver what you said you would, you’re good.

And this is where lean user experience shines. You’re validating the experience, not the technology. You’re seeing if the idea resonates before you spend months engineering it.

As long as the user gets what the site promises they’ll be happy and assume that this is a more advanced application than it actually is.

The obvious downside

It sounds great and it is, but there’s a cost.

You’re trading development time for manual labour. Someone still has to process the forms, write the emails, and track everything in a spreadsheet. It’s scrappy. It’s inefficient. But it’s a means to an end.

That’s why the Wizard of Oz approach fits squarely in a lean product experimentation mindset. You’re not trying to build the whole machine. You’re trying to find out whether it’s worth building in the first place.

This style of MVP delivers two major wins:

1. Direct contact with users

You get early adopters in the door fast. These are real humans, not personas. They’ve signed up because something in your message clicked. Now they’re in your inbox. Talk to them. Ask questions. Understand what made them say yes and what nearly made them say no.

2. Learn before you build

This is the holy grail of lean user experience. You’re avoiding the trap of building the wrong thing. Instead of launching and hoping, you’re testing and refining. If users love it, great, you’re ready to scale. If not, you haven’t wasted months on the wrong bet.

Perhaps the feedback you get from your users is that everything is A-OK and that they love your prototype. That’s great, now you’re in the enviable position of having a clear vision for what your customers want.

This is also a smart moment to layer in other lean tactics like the fake door test, where you place a button or feature in the UI to gauge interest, even though it doesn’t actually work yet.

Repeat Without Regret

When you’re not tied to a backend, you’re free to evolve fast. Change the copy. Try a different flow. Shift the positioning entirely.

It’s an experimental mindset that’s core to lean user experience. Every action becomes a learning opportunity. Every click or comment adds clarity.

You’re not wasting effort, you’re compounding insight.

A Short-Term Strategy With a Long-Term Payoff

Let’s be honest: you can’t Wizard-of-Oz your way to a full product forever.

At some point, scale becomes the problem. That CookSmart email system? It’ll collapse once 100 users sign up, let alone 1,000.

So yes, this is a temporary hack. But it’s a smart one. It buys you the most valuable thing a startup can have: validated learning.

Just make sure you have your roadmap ready. The next phase is systematising what worked, tossing what didn’t, and investing in real infrastructure.

That’s the progression from scrappy MVP to real product.

If you’re launching something new and still figuring out what people want, this approach is gold.

The Wizard of Oz MVP is one of the most honest tools in the lean user experience toolkit. It forces you to engage with real users, respond to real needs, and move with speed and flexibility.

And that’s what good product development is really about. You’re not faking it, you’re focusing on it. Fast learning, not false polish.

Need a hand putting together something to put in front of customers and get feedback? Talk to us

 

If you’re stuck waiting for the “perfect” product to ship, you’re already too late.

We’ll help you launch smarter with lean user experience and MVPs that validate early. Let’s talk.