Budget App Part 3: Defining a Minimum Viable Product

Paul Riviera
Sep 1, 2018 · 3 min read

Last week we walked through our proof of concept, and we discovered that we are able to get transactions from our bank and save them in a database. Now we have to plan out what to do with those transactions and create features to put in our Minimum Viable Product. Unfortunately, we wont be coding this week. However, when you start a project, clearly planing out what to build can make things a lot easier once you begin coding.

Proof of Concept: If you missed last weeks post you can see it here.

What is a Minimum Viable Product?

Each application has a purpose, some problem to solve or a task to accomplish. In our case it’s to help the user budget better and get a handle on their spending. The Minimum Viable Product or MVP is the simplest set of features to accomplish the purpose of the application.

Choosing the features in a MVP is often a difficult task. Not because it is hard to think of features, but because it is hard to choose features to leave out. It would be awesome if, in our first release, we built a budget tool with machine learning to generate weekly and monthly budgets based on preferences learned through user interaction. However, doing so would greatly delay the initial release and its important to get the app in the hands of users to get feedback on the initial features and design. The initial feedback is so important because it tells you if your on the right track and if there is a demand for your app.

What are our MVP Features

For our personal budget app, we will have only a few simple features:

  1. Allow a User to view how much money they have spent and where it was spent in the last month.
  2. Allow a User to view how much income they recieved in the last month.
  3. Allow a User to view a report for the month comparing their expenses with their income.
  4. Allow a User to view past monthly reports.

I know this does not seem like a lot but there is a lot that goes into an application. We want this to be simple so that we can focus on making it work. After building the MVP, and making sure it is stable, we will then begin to add features and expand what the app can do.

What comes next?

After we know our MVP features we need to begin to plan the services and backend infrastructure that we will need to make the MVP work. Don’t worry if your not sure what I am talking about right now. Next week we will begin to outline the Tasks or Work Items that will need to be built for our app. In order to outline and track these Work Items we will use a tool called Visual Studio Team Services, but I will cover that more next week.

Paul Riviera

Written by

Software Engineer | Entrepreneur | World Traveler

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