How to make MVPs that do your ideas (and your users) justice
Shipping ‘minimum viable products’ allows us to innovate. It means we can take risks and test big bets. Without MVPs, we could toil away on projects for months, perfecting every screen and edge case — without knowing whether people actually need or want the thing we’re working on.
But if the MVP doesn’t perform, how do you know if it’s the idea or the execution that needs work? Sometimes great ideas get sunk by a minimum viable product that isn’t really viable at all.
Here are a few rules of thumb to help avoid those pitfalls, and get the most value from your MVPs.
(Psst — not sure what an MVP is? Here’s a great definition)
Make MVPs solely to learn from
When you’re building an MVP, you should always know exactly what you want to learn and how you’ll learn it — and broadly, how you might use that to develop the product. If you don’t know that, the odds are you’re either not ready to ship yet or you’re not actually building an MVP.
Know what ‘minimum viable’ really means
MVPs by definition will have a few imperfections. It’s part and parcel of working fast.
You might be constrained on where the information fits into the customer journey, even if ideally it would come at a completely different time. You might have to cram content into an existing component when you really need a new one to get everything across. And you might be totally focused on the happy path — deprioritising edge cases and complex what-if scenarios.
But imperfections are fine as long as they’re intentional. If you agree with your team at the beginning what ‘minimum viable product’ actually means — for your product and your users — then you can define what the acceptable imperfections are, together.
For example, you might find it helpful to list key pieces of information that absolutely have to be included in order to make the product viable for users.
Usability test your MVP
As a team, you’re all excited about your bold new MVP and want to get it out as fast as possible. But usability testing first is critical. Because without that, you don’t know if there are basic problems that will cause it to struggle out there in production. Those problems could be easily fixed to give the idea a much fairer chance at success.
And if your MVP doesn’t hit the right numbers when it does get released, without usability testing, you might never know exactly why it didn’t work. Which means you’re not truly learning anything!
Remember copy is the cheapest way to improve something
Imagine your MVP is released — and it’s not performing as you’d hoped. Before you assign it to the scrapheap of ideas that ‘didn’t test well’, try some copy surgery.
Copy is generally the easiest, ‘cheapest’ thing to change in any product experience. Could you try something different with content? Something as simple as rewriting a heading or a CTA might help. What have you got to lose?
Don’t let the MVP become the product
When our MVPs perform well, it’s a great feeling. And if the numbers are good enough, it’s easy enough to roll out the MVP and then move on to the next new idea. But what about the part where you improve it based on what you’ve learned? Or add in the edge cases and nice-to-have parts you dropped in favour of getting to market fast?
Without re-investing in the idea that you know works, you could end up creating a narrow overall experience.
A job candidate once said to me, when asked why they were looking for a new role, “I want to stop shipping MVPs.” ‘Why’s that?’ I asked. “Because I never have time to do things right.”
In theory, MVPs aren’t permanent.
But for this content designer, the improving part never came — or at least, rarely, usually because of a pivot in business strategy that meant the original MVP was no longer fit for purpose.
This led to a customer experience that felt, in their words, fragmented. Bouncing from rapidly designed screen to another, with A/B tests and other experiments layered on top.
An MVP is defined by being just-good-enough to ship. And if your whole product is made up of MVPs that are just good enough, the overall experience is just good enough. Not great. And without a great product, you can’t win.
Use MVPs as a way to get better — become a better writer, designer, and to make your product better. But don’t let them become the product.
