MVP, User Stories, & Features List

Learning about Minimal Viable Products can help your team prioritize features for a first launch, and ultimately create more value for your users.

Lest the design team focus on delivery to the detriment of the actual utility of a product, a great way to approach the MVP is to remember the true goals of their application, and refer back to the “Jobs to Be Done”. As it is an outcome-driven model, JTBD outlines the fundamental goal a user wishes to accomplish or the problem they wish to solve in a given situation. It’s a centring influence.

Answering the following questions will guide you to create a scenario:

• Who is the user? (Pro top: refer back to your persona)
• What has motivated them to use your app? What are their expectations? (What have they grown up to expect in a situation will affect their experience of your product)
• What are their goals?

For example:

I’m currently working on a little passion project to help match young professional self employed women with mentors. I’ve created a User Persona, so I’ll use that to craft a scenario where they’re motivated to solve a problem. Ideally, they’ll use a product (mine!) to help them solve that problem.

The Scenario

Anya is self employed. She wants to build her business and achieve her career goals, but she feels stuck. She needs advice from a professional who knows her field and has done this before but she doesn’t know anyone she can approach. She is confident in situations where she feels comfortable, but is naturally quiet and finds in-person networking difficult. Finding a mentor with the right match in expertise, character, and budget are her highest concerns.

The scenario here distills the user story and gives context on why, where, and how your product would be used.

User Stories

“User stories” or “job stories” sum up JTBD and suggest a solution, like so: “When I ___, I want ___, so I can ___”. Another example would be: “As a [role or persona], I want to [task/goal], so that [way I will benefit]”. For Anya above, I can craft a number of possible user stories — all plausible descriptions of her pain points identified, her expectations, and my opportunities to help:

• As a business owner, I want to find a mentor to give me personalized advice, so that I can reach my business goals.
• As an entrepreneur, I want to learn from someone who’s been through this before, so I can benefit from their experience.
• As a business owner, I want help to improve my operations, so I can secure more business in the future.
• As a freelancer, I want to ask a role model questions about this contract, so I conduct myself professionally.
• As a freelancer, I want to make more money, so I have more security in the future.

Minimal Viable Product

Feature Prioritization

This is what is going to define the first priorities of a project, plan the work, and result in a distilled version of the product that is simpler but effective at doing what it will ultimately do.

I’ve created a list of possible features below:

• Login
• Your Profile — picture, field, match criteria
• Mentor pool
• One-on-one pairing
• Mentoring session scheduler
• Use of camera API to video chat
• Personal notes on mentoring sessions (includes area for follow up tasks)

• Follow-up task reminders
• Calendar view of sessions/tasks due
• Session rating (providing feedback on the match and on the mentor)
• Shortlists of matches (2–3 to choose from)

• Conversation primers for sessions (related to user goals/specific problems, or suggestions of topics to consider)
• “Freemium” tiers (could include those extra mentors to choose from)
• Group mentoring (possibly at a lower subscription cost)
• Message boards (Community advice)
• Location services (useful for in-person meet-ups)
• Pay with a post
• Connect LinkedIn profile/bio
• Connect to FB or LinkedIn for mutual friends

In the list above, the features in bold italic are the ones I’ve determined to be my MVP for the beta release. Italic are important (nice to have, but not MVP).

In order to prioritize features without stripping utility from the user experience, I thought about the user journey. In this case the shortest direct path starts at login and leads to creating a profile, setting criteria, successfully matching with a mentor, actual mentoring, and ending with some actionable follow through for the protégé.

Some “nice to have”s I’m considering are conversation primers, session ratingValue-adds like community message boards, a choice between several mentoring candidates, etc. would probably be sidelined to a future release.

All of this raised a lot of questions for me, particularly related to the onboarding process. I’ve got a lot of ideas to explore there.