How to Minimize Development and Maximize Growth with an MVP Tree
Whether you are in the tech industry and would like to expedite your product creation or you are working towards the next unicorn, an MVP should always be the objective to get your product from concept to production.
“A minimum viable product (MVP) is a product with just enough features to satisfy early customers, and to provide feedback for future product development.” — Wikipedia
However, coming up with an MVP is easier said than done. Throughout the process of designing an MVP, it’s easy to get lost in the weeds. Paying attention to tasks that may be a part of the product, but are not good candidates for the MVP, is time-consuming and wasteful.
Thus, creating an MVP Tree is helpful for alleviating these growing pains. By working your way down from the most abstract goal to your concrete tasks, we can come up with an MVP that minimizes development and maximizes growth.
Understanding the MVP Tree
An MVP Tree is a representation of the goals that need to be completed for the MVP to be considered finished.
At the top of the tree is the overall objective of the product and the most abstract goal. This is called the top-level goal and should be a single line about what you’re attempting to do with your product.
The goals directly underneath the top-level goal help us understand what needs to be done to achieve the top-level goal. Mid-level goals are more concrete than the top-level goal but are abstractions still from the actual tasks that need to be completed.
There can be multiple mid-level goals like this, but they should become more concrete as they get lower in the tree.
Once you reach the bottom of the tree the goals become concrete tasks. These are the actual tasks that need to be completed in order for your MVP to be considered finished. Underneath a terminating mid-level goal should be two or more concrete tasks. If you only have one then your mid-level goal is most likely a concrete task.
Creating an MVP Tree
Below is an example MVP Tree for a product to sell shoes from consumer to consumer.
The top-level goal, in this case, is to sell shoes consumer to consumer. In order to achieve this, we have three mid-level goals to help obtain our top-level goal.
We’ll need accounts for users, a place for users to view shoes, and the ability to purchase shoes. While these are all still abstract by their nature, they help us see what needs to be done for our MVP.
Then, underneath each of these mid-level goals is a few concrete tasks. Once all of the concrete tasks under a mid-level goal are finished, we consider the aforementioned mid-level goal finished. Continuing as such, once all of our mid-level goals are finished, our MVP is complete and ready for production!
If you liked this, feel free to leave a clap or two so other people will see this here on Medium. Also, I highly recommend checking out the Book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth. In this book, she describes a goal hierarchy which helped me repurpose the idea for the MVP Tree. It is easily my favorite book and I can not recommend it enough.
