A Step-by-Step Guide to Building a Minimum Viable Product — Creating & Validating the Solution (Part II)
Great to see that you haven’t ghosted me yet ;) In our first article, we defined our problem and gathered insight from potential users. Now, the real fun begins. Using many elements of Google Ventures’ five-day sprint methodology for prototyping and testing ideas concisely outlined in Jake Knapp’s Sprint, we will bring our ideas to life with the think, make, check mantra. Gather all of the key players (developers, designers, product managers, etc.) in a room and start cranking away.
Day One: Map
- Start at the End
Look ahead to the end of your sprint and define success by setting a long term goal. A way to identify your target goal is to ask yourself, “Why are we running this sprint?” It’s important to define clear goals early because they center your entire team around a shared mission, provide a standard for success and help prevent your team from chasing rabbit holes.
For Beige Notes, the members of our team first each individually brainstormed long term goals and then we gathered to share and combine our thoughts into the following mission:
Beige Notes provides a platform to give and receive closure and thoughtful feedback on your past dates.
2. Lay Out Your Assumptions
Assumptions really can make an a** out of you and kill your product. Nevertheless, in order to get started, we will need to make some assumptions. After we’ve laid them out, we can prioritize which ones to tackle first.
To help identify our assumptions, we asked our team the following questions:
- To achieve our mission, what must be true?
- What are some potential reasons why our product would fail?
Below were our key assumptions for Beige Notes:
- Daters actually want to receive honest dating feedback
- Daters are willing to ask for feedback
- Daters want to give honest dating feedback
- Daters are comfortable sharing personal dating details through a web app
3. Map it Out
Now that we are armed with our goals and assumptions, map out a rough storyboard of the key stages your target personas will go through before, during and after they’ve used your product. A storyboard is a visual representation of our user. It does not show how the user actually interacts with the product. Instead, it expresses the broader context of the problem, frames the problem and solution and forces us to think critically about the problem. This is a high level view of your product’s experience and should be done quickly.
What it includes:
- Setting: Who are the key players and what is the environment?
- Sequence: What leads someone to use the product and what other steps are involved?
- Satisfaction: What is the motivation for the user and what is the end result?
Some tips:
- Keep your mission statement and questions in mind throughout. Have them written somewhere the entire team can see.
- Identify the key players on the left.
- Write the ending on the right.
- Keep it simple — it should be a high level view of the key stages. We do not need to account for every use case here. Use words and arrows only. It is not meant to be a piece of art.
4. Re-Pitch the Idea
At this point, break for lunch. As members of the team start returning, the facilitator and/or the person leading the sprint should meet with each member individually for a few minutes and ask them to provide their interpretation of the product’s pitch. This is a great way to identify holes in the product concept, identify potential solutions, promote open dialogue and provide individual members with personalized opportunities to contribute.
5. How Might We?
It’s time to break down our idea by using the How Might We method. First developed by Proctor & Gamble in the 1970s and still championed by IDEO, How Might We is a fast and efficient method to gain insight from your team by having them rephrase their concerns into open-ended optimistic questions beginning with “How might we?” By standardizing the wording of questions, we’re able to pull ideas that would have been stuck in our team’s notebooks (and taken hours to cull through) out in front of the entire team to see. As Jake Knapp explains, “[They] force us to look for opportunities and challenges, rather than getting bogged down by problems or, almost worse, jumping to solutions too soon.”
Gather your team into a room where the map, mission and assumptions are all clearly visible and equip them each with Post-Its and markers to individually write their own How Might We questions and post them to a board.
6. Target
We now have a bunch of questions, but where do we begin?
Organize your How Might We Post-Its into themed groups and allow each member to vote on the ones they feel are the most critical to the product. Some ideas to keep track of votes are to use stickers or a marking system.
For Beige Notes, some of our most popular How Might We questions were:
- How might we incentivize the “ghoster” to provide feedback?
- How might we prevent cruel feedback?
- How might we promote insightful feedback?
That’s the end of day one!
Day Two: Sketch
Today is an important day. We will focus on sketching out solutions. Remember to keep your mission statement and assumptions in a visible place for your team to reference.
- Lightning Demos
Have each team member research some sources of inspiration and then ask them to present their findings to the rest of the team. For Beige Notes, we focused our research on the following questions:
Question One: Are there other products doing something similar in a different market we can tap into for inspiration?
Some companies we were inspired by:
- Ebay: We were intrigued by Ebay’s review model for buyers and sellers. Both sides are incentivized to maintain a good rating in order to continue using Ebay’s services.
- Yelp: Our team primarily used Yelp to read reviews. Only if we were on the polar sides of the good and bad spectrum did we feel compelled to write a review of a restaurant.
- Uber & Lyft: We all had a high frequency of reviews completed for our drivers due to the ease of use on our smartphones, reminders received right after a completed ride, and knowledge that drivers also review their passengers.
Question Two: Who are our competitors? What are they doing and not doing well?
Our closest competitors:
- Lulu: Once a mobile app that allowed females to anonymously rate men based on keywords has now transformed into a generic dating app without this capability. In the old days, Lulu gained popularity as a platform to identify the mean to avoid. It did not provide males the opportunity to counter a scathing review.
- Peeple — An iOS app released earlier this year, Peeple has been highly criticized. Peeple provides a platform to rate your professional, personal and dating connections and to recommend them.
2. Sketch
To sketch our solutions, we will take the following four-step approach:
(1) Notes: Review your notes on the goals, assumptions, map and inspiration sources.
(2) Ideas: Go for quantity not quality and jot down as many ideas that come to mind. Do not try to qualify your ideas at this stage. Write down whatever comes to mind.
(3) Crazy 8s: In eight minutes and with one sheet of paper folded into eight rectangles, rapidly sketch out as many variations of your solutions as you can. Sometimes your first idea will be the best idea and other times, your last will be game changing. Regardless, the purpose of this exercise is to help you consider alternatives.
(4) Solution Sketch: Figure out the details and create a single well rounded concept to present to your team.
Tips on sketching:
- You are not making a masterpiece. Stick figures are fine and ugly is okay.
- Be concise with your wording.
- Make it self explanatory. Think of your sketch as the first MVP of your idea. If your team mates cannot understand it, no one else will.
- Consider the entire experience. What story does your product tell? Revisit your map as a guide.
- Bring it to life with a title.
- Keep them anonymous. Do not share with your team members your sketches just yet.
Post your team’s sketches onto a wall and have everyone silently read through the solutions and written any questions they have beneath the sketches. All sketches should be kept anonymous until tomorrow.
Day Three: Decide
So many choices, how do we decide? Have each creator pitch their solution and answer any questions they received. Open the floor for more Q&A if needed. After all solutions have been pitched, equip everyone with dot stickers and have them place them on top of standout ideas from each solution. Review the winning ideas together as a team and combine them into a cohesive product.
For Beige Notes, the solution we created involved allowing a person to log onto Beige Notes and answer some questions regarding a specific person they have dated. Once completed, the other person receives a message from Beige Notes with a small snippet of a positive message written by the initiator and a request that they return the favor and answer the same questions. Only when both sides have answered the same questions do they both get to view the answers.
Day Four: Prototype
We have a target problem and solution. It’s time for us to create a minimum viable product (MVP). As a reminder, a MVP is just enough product to validate that we provide value to our user. Be scrappy and don’t be afraid to see your idea fail. The purpose of prototyping is to quickly test our ideas with the minimum amount of effort and resources spent.
Some tips on prototyping:
- Pick the right tools.
Paper wireframes are almost always a safe bet. They can be created in seconds. Some other ideas include Keynote, PowerPoint, foam board, 3D printing, etc. When selecting tools look for items that you have at your disposal and are easy to manipulate. - Divide and conquer.
Each member of your team will have an expertise in a certain area. Do not try to do everything together. This will slow down the process and prevent your individual expertise to shine. If you’re great at drawing, offer to do the sketches. If you’re great with marketing, work on gathering people to test your prototypes on. - Do a trial run.
Test out your MVP on each other. This should be ongoing throughout the entire creation. See what works and iterate as your build. Do not wait until the end to learn that you need to scrap your entire idea.
Types of MVPs:
- Paper sketches and wireframes
- Video: This is helpful when demonstrating difficult and unfamiliar concepts. An example is Dropbox.
- Landing Pages: With the capability to add metrics, heat mapping and sign up forms, landing pages are a great way to gauge interest. Example, think KickStarter.
- Wizard of OZ: Provides the illusion that the product is fully functioning and automated, but behind the curtains, everything is being manually performed. Many companies such as Zappos and Amazon have successfully utilized this.
For BeigeNotes, we utilized a Wizard of Oz landing page and paper prototyping.
For our landing page, we purchased the domain www.BeigeNotes.com for $12 and used Squarespace’s $9/mo template. In less than an hour and without using any coding skills, we had a site up and running with a short description of our product and a link to sign up. Although we envisioned Beige Notes to be a mobile app where users could answer questions and a text message to their past date would automatically be generated, we mimicked this by using Typeform to create unique surveys for each user and manually sending text messages from our own phones (link to sample survey.) Typeform enabled us not only to make beautiful surveys but we could also track of which surveys were viewed, on what kinds of devices and their rate of completion. By keeping it simple and using our own phones to send messages, we were able to quickly test and also iterate.
Through our paper prototypes, we were able to gain immediate and in depth feedback on our wireframes for our phone application. Wireframes are a visual guide for a website or app that is used for planning, communication and testing ideas. Our paper wireframes were done on 8.5’ x 11’ paper with a black sharpie. These prototypes were very bare bones (i.e. we didn’t use a ruler) but they allowed us to focus on content layout, relationships, interface functionality and the user interaction. We could quickly test and refine navigation, evaluate layout and determine development requirements to build out the application.
When sketching wireframes, some questions you should keep in mind are:
- What is your goal?
- What is the call to action?
- What happens next?
- What information does the user need?
Day Five: Test
It’s time to see your baby in action. We will test our prototypes internally and externally through interviewing and observing users reactions to our product. By the end of the day, we’ll know whether we need to pivot and make changes or proceed with development.
- Eat Your Own Dog Food
“Dogfooding”refers to a company using their own product to test and promote it. It is a great way to work out the kinks for the product and gain insight before releasing it to the world. For Beige Notes, I tested a bare bones version which consisted of just a text message with a personalized message and a link to a unique Typeform survey.
75% of the recipients opened the link and approximately 25% of all recipients actually completed the survey. Some didn’t respond and continued ghosting me. Others advised me that if I wanted clarity on anything I should reach out directly. And some others reached out to me directly to find out what happened.
For the ones that did respond, some general trends and takeaways I found:
- The better dates (but not the best) were the ones that responded.
- I did not receive any unreasonable criticism.
- I found a majority of the feedback insightful and relieving.
2. Wizard of Oz Your Way Through
Using the Wizard of Oz prototype we built out, we tested our idea on real couples. Finding participants to beta test your product can be time consuming. From our survey posted on Reddit and landing page, we were able to collect volunteers to beta test our product. Some other tactics we used included:
- Handing out flyers
- Using Instagram to direct traffic to our landing page
- Posting flyers in areas with high visibility
- Contacting people directly on dating apps
- Incentivizing participants by raffling off copies of Aziz Ansari’s Modern Romance
3. Get Feedback
It is important to gather feedback from your testing. While you can dog food and have many users beta test your prototypes, you should set aside time to do interviews and demos with five potential users. Five is the golden number because it provides enough feedback for you to identify some general trends, and cuts off the dilemma of wanting to satisfy all use cases.
An outline of how to conduct an interview:
- Welcome your user.
Make it clear that you are testing the product and not the user, so they should not be afraid of providing the wrong answer. - Ask context questions.
Ask questions about the user’s life, interests and activities to help give you context for understanding their responses and to help you gain rapport with them. - Introduce the prototype.
By reminding the user that you are testing the prototype, you encourage them to give blunt feedback. - Have the user perform detailed tasks with the prototype.
Good tasks should be somewhat vague. You want to allow the user to interact with the prototype and figure it out on their own. - Debrief to capture the user’s general thoughts.
Some sample questions to ask include “How would you describe this product to a friend?” and “If you had a magic wand that could improve this product, what would you change?”
After testing, compile your notes and review what worked well and what didn’t work. If the data is unclear, continue testing. It is also possible that you have not found product market fit and your solution has not been validated. If this is the case, do not move forward. Instead, consider how you can revise your solution to reach product market fit.
N E X T → Managing a Sprint
If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, drop me a line below or directly at beigenotes@gmail.com.
Resources:
An overview of the design sprint from Google Ventures
Article on prioritizing risks with a probability matrix
More examples of MVPs
Wireframing Resources
A Beginner’s Guide to Wireframing
10 Free Wireframing Tools for Designers
Prototyping tools:
Marvel — Create Clickable Prototypes (Free)
Invision — Create Clickable Prototypes (Free & Paid Versions)
Balsamiq — Good for Simple Wireframes (Free trial)
Proto.io — Fully Interactive High Fidelity Prototypes (Free 15 day trial)
