What’s an MVP?

What they should and shouldn’t be

What’s an MVP?

A Minimum Viable Product is the smallest thing you can design and build to a high quality, that delivers customer value, that is just enough to solve the targeted problem and you can use to test assumptions. It is not the smallest thing you can build full stop.

A major reason why a feature or even a company fails is because they design their product based on assumptions. It’s easy to fall into the trap of assuming that your product will solve a problem better than any existing solution. It’s even more common to put time and resources into solving the wrong problem.

If you don’t get your MVP correct;

• You won’t learn anything about a customer’s understanding of the proposition
• You won’t know if your solution fulfills a need or solves a problem
• UX and development issues will overshadow the actual purpose of the product, meaning again you won’t know if it’s successful
• You won’t be able to honestly assess the results and learn from the work you have done

An MVP needs a hard value proposition. This is something highly measurable and has a direct impact on the problem you are trying to solve. A soft proposition is hard to measure and has no impact on the problem impacting your ability to learn from your MVP.

How do we design an MVP?

Always think about the customer

When designing an MVP you have to be pragmatic, and prioritise some things over another, so you have to let go of some of the parts of the product that may not add as much customer value. Always thinking about the customer and their needs helps you to decide what to let go of.

Design as little as possible

This doesn’t mean be lazy this means don’t make things more complicated than they need to be. It’s easier to build on top of something than to remove things. Give yourself a chance to change and evolve as you learn without the headache of being held back by inflexible design components or an overworked solution. Using reusable components and design elements help to get the most out of as few working parts as possible. You can make the design more focused as you learn more about customers and the product.

Good enough

Good enough is better than perfect. The aim is continuous improvement rather than perfection from the start.