If you’re commissioning an agency to build your MVP, there’s some jargon you might as well know.
One of them is “production” and one related to that is “UAT”. These are both types of “environments”.
Production basically just means “the thing is ready for use by the customer”. I actually had to look up where the term comes from, but it’s just an old manufacturing term, i.e. “we’re producing this now, so that it can be sold”.
Production use means real data used by real customers, with real commercial value flowing from that use into the business that owns it.
UAT stands for “user acceptance testing”, and is an entirely separate environment to production. How it works is the developer will write some code, ultimately that code will be put onto “UAT” for you (the customer) to test, and if you sign it off, it’ll go into “production”.
UAT environments use fake copies of the real data, so that if there are any bugs it doesn’t cause any real problems. It’s an isolated environment just used to find bugs and issues.