From Idea to Product Launch: How to Build an MVP Experiment — Part 3

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Product Tips

9 min readApr 6, 2023

In Part 1 of this series, we discussed 13 steps for conducting an MVP experiment, while in Part 2 I have started to detail the first 6 steps (through a hypothetical example) for designing an MVP experiment for a dog-walking app.

To recap, here are the MVP experiment steps:

Identify the need
Determine the long-term goal
Identify the minimum criteria for success
Identify the target market
Research your competition
Craft your hypothesis
Conduct customer research
Identify the user journey
Decide what features to build
Develop the actual MVP
Market your MVP to the target users
Analyze experiment results
Iterate or drop it

In our third and final segment, we dive into the remaining steps, beginning where we left off, starting with step 7. Let’s discover how we can reach the point where we know whether or not our target users are interested in our product.

7. Conduct customer research

Questions to be answered: Is the target market I have identified actually willing to use and pay for my product? Are the needs that I have listed valid? Does my product effectively address those needs?

Now that you’ve identified what problem your solution is solving and for whom, talk to your prospective customers by conducting interviews. Your goal is to find out if this is a real problem for them and, if the answer is yes, how big of a problem it is and how they are currently solving it right now. Consider what other solutions or workarounds they might be using, how often, and in what circumstances.

Step 4 (Identify the target market) and Step 7 work hand in hand. After identifying the potential customers, I need to make sure that walking their dogs by themselves is indeed a real problem for them, how big of a problem it is, whether it can be fixed by my product, or if they have already solved it by using another app or solution.

In a real-life scenario, we would recruit and conduct customer interviews for my product’s user personas, but for the purposes of this article, let’s examine a brief research plan.

Research statement

We want to understand the needs of the target personas I have identified for my product and assess whether and how my dog-walking app can solve them.

Research questions for dog owners

What are the needs and goals of my potential customers?
How often do they walk their dogs or have someone else do this for them?
What makes it difficult for them to walk their dogs by themselves?
Do they have any concerns about other people walking their dogs for them?
Did they use any dog-walking apps in the past? Do they currently use/ have a subscription to any dog-walking app?
- If yes, how would they evaluate their experience with the dog-walking app they are/ were using? Are/ were they satisfied? How did they find out about the app? How did they decide to use it?
- If not, why? What would make them use a dog-walking service?
Do they use any other pet support services or did they use any in the past?
- If yes, how was their experience?
- If not, why?
What would they like a dog-walking app to do for them? What are they looking for in such a service?
What would motivate them to use my product?

Research questions for dog walkers

Why would they want to walk other people’s dogs?
How much time would they be able to invest in this activity?
Do they have experience with using apps for dog-walkers? If yes, which app? How would they evaluate their experience? How did they find out about the dog-walking app? How did they decide to use that one?
What are they looking for in an app for dog-walkers?
What would motivate them to use my product?

… and so on. The above questions are just some examples, the list could extend depending on what you need to find out at this stage.

Research method

Conducting in-depth interviews, following a semi-structured interview script

Length of the interview: 30 minutes
Number of interviews: 15 interviews per each user persona
Tools and devices: Online interviews hosted over a meeting platform, recorded
Participants:
- Interviewer (me) and interviewee (a person that fits one user persona)
- Product role (Product Manager/ Product Owner/ Business Analyst)
- UX role (UX researcher/ UX designer)

Participants

Recruit people who represent our potential users, 15 people for each user persona identified at Step 4. At this stage, it’s important to consider the socio-demographics of each user persona so that you include interviewees who match them as much as possible. Pay attention to the location of your prospective customers and which continent/ country/ area you are trying to reach.

After conducting the interviews and analyzing the answers, take a step back and re-evaluate the needs you thought your customers would have at Step 1, the potential target market (Step 4), the competition (Step 5), and your hypothesis (Step 6).

If after this stage you realize that your assumptions and hypothesis are invalid, you can pivot:

either by solving a different problem, taking you back to Step 1
or by conducting customer research interviews for the second most likely target users you identified at Step 4

8. Identify the user journey

Assuming you passed the previous step, then you should map the user journey for each user persona. The user journey should list all the actions/ steps the end user is required to take in order to achieve their goal.

Basic user journey for finding a dog-walker through the dog-walking app:

*I have created this basic journey using* *miro.com*

In order to make sure you are building only the essential features, you can list all the actions from your user journey and map each action based on a pay and gain map: how big is the pain versus how much value the user is receiving when that pain is addressed.

Example

Action: Find a dog walker
Pain: Trouble finding the availability of dog walkers
Gain: View available dog walkers and book immediately

For each user persona, count the number of pains and gains for each action. Ideally, when it makes sense, you should assign a value using a point system to help quantify the importance/ impact of each gain.

9. Decide what features to build

Transform the pains into opportunities

You can do this by using the “How might we” format, ie: How might we make it easier to book dog walkers? At this stage, you want to transform the pains and gains into features.

Prioritize your features

Use a prioritization matrix (effort vs impact) or something similar to prioritize the most impactful features. Remember that you’re interested in the minimum amount of features to validate your idea. When prioritizing, always keep in mind the long-term goal of your product.

According to this report, there are a lot of SaaS services available for dog walking such as TimeToPet, Scout, Pet Sitter Plus, PetSitClick, and DoTimely so it’s worth checking out what features they offer and whether it would be more effective to integrate them into my product instead of building everything from scratch.

The main initiatives could focus on the following:

Dog owners portal
Dog walkers portal
Communication method between dog owners and dog walkers
Notifications in real-time for both the dog owners and dog walkers
Tracking the dog when on a walk
Scheduler for dog walking appointments
Payment system and invoicing
Metrics/ Analytics (so that we can check the app usage and retention metrics)

10. Develop the actual MVP

An important point to consider at this step is to decide which platform to deploy your MVP on — web, tablet, mobile. My assumption is that both Josh and Jennifer, our potential dog owner & walker, would be more inclined to use their phones to look for a dog walking opportunity.

Assuming we are moving forward with mobile focus only, the next step would be to decide which type of application would be best for an MVP — native apps, hybrid, or web apps? In this case, since we’re conducting an experiment and want to get the most info with the least amount of resources, I would opt for a web app which can be accessed both from web and mobile and require the least amount of cost and time to develop, while still doing the job. I am not prioritizing optimizing the UX or the performance of the application at this point in time, therefore a web app should do the trick.

11. Market your MVP to the target users

After your MVP is released, it’s time to start targeting my early adopters– users with similar characteristics to Josh and Jennifer. For both Josh and Jennifer I have assumed that they would have an online and social media presence, so I could start promoting my product in those online channels. While Jennifer might be more influenced to try my product based on a referral, I still need to build up my initial base of users beforehand. Therefore, I will start with digital advertising, organic, and paid media: Facebook and Instagram (integrated channel ads), Google search and display ads for Jennifer and Instagram (story ads, in-message), and Instagram and Tik Tok ads for Josh. Once we get the initial results, we can use remarketing campaigns to stay close to those we have already interacted with via the ads.

From this point on, I should start measuring and monitoring the KPIs, metrics and my product analytics. Give yourself a clear timeframe for observing how your product is used, what type of users are drawn to it, retention, churn, feedback and complaints you might receive from your customers, reviews, and anything else you find relevant to analyze.

12. Analyze experiment results

This is the moment of the truth. You want to be as honest as possible with yourself and assess whether your minimum criteria for success have been met after the said period you established for the experiment.

Don’t sugar-coat it, it’s better to drop out of an experiment where you’ve invested as little as possible instead of throwing money and resources at a product that won’t benefit anyone.

Questions to consider:

Did you meet your minimum criteria for success?
If not, why?
- Which assumptions or hypotheses were validated?
- Did you target the right users at step 11?
Are your users using the product the way you imagined it would be?
What can we learn from the user behavior?
How can we adjust the product to better meet their needs?
Did we discover new needs/ problems the users have that we can solve?
Did you measure the right stuff?

13. Iterate or drop it

It’s time to make a decision. Did the product have the outcome we expected? Should we iterate, grow it, and adapt it to better serve the needs of our customers or just call it a day? Should we pivot and try again with a different target persona? Should we try different marketing channels to reach them? How can we apply what we’ve learned from the experiment to better solve the needs of the users?

The decision is all yours!

Resources & Further Reading