Is the MVP your key to success?
It’s easy to become caught up in the excitement of a new project, but there are many factors that we cannot predict at the start which end up making projects longer and more expensive than expected. According to studies, 90% of startups will fail, primarily due to a lack of planning and research which led them to run out of recourses before getting any user adoption.
Therefore, we need a workflow that enables us to create products and features that can be evaluated as soon as possible.
There will always be more features things to add and more areas that need tinkering before we feel ready to launch a new project. But, if we stay here for too long, it will become costly and dangerous. Therefore, we need to set concise and actionable goals that can direct our efforts towards a Minimum Viable Product that reduces risk as early as possible.
A Minimum Viable Product, or MVP, is the version of your design that requires the least amount of effort or resources in order to produce a viable, usable product.
This doesn’t mean that we should give people shoddy drafts, but rather that we should identify which features and specifications are necessary in order to produce a product that we can validate with our users and adapt our designs based on real user feedback.
It’s easy to find startups that had to “pivot” or products that “didn’t gain traction” after people already invested a lot of time and money. There are various reasons for this, but most of those could've been foreseen—and probably even avoided—if the team was able to test their hypotheses and design implementations more quickly.
Let’s briefly look at 3 ways to do this with interactive technology such as applications and websites.
Design Sprint
A sprint is a design approach that was developed by Google’s product development experts to help teams create products and features faster. These teams will usually get experts from different disciplines together and set aside a few days to design, develop, and validate their ideas.
There are about 5 steps to this design process which can be repeated as many times as needed:
- Understand and Define: Teams carefully define the goals and constraints of the project and explore the problem space.
- Diverge: Next, everyone will brainstorm different solutions using a variety of sketching and ideation techniques.
- Decide: Then, the team will get together and decide on which feature to prioritise using zen voting or feature mapping.
- Prototype: Based on the goals and time constraints of the sprint, the designers and developers can now create prototypes of various fidelities to use for user testing.
- Validate: Finally, the team must determine if the project was successful. If it failed, it happened with less investment and hopefully offers some valuable insights. And if it was a success, it will provide a foundation to build upon.
Piecemeal MVP
The development phase is usually the most time-consuming part of any process and it’s easy to waste a lot of time on creating complex features like chatbots and third party social media logins while there is still a lot of risk in the project. Therefore, it’s often better to plan ahead and decide which features to outsource or pieced together from third parties to get the ball rolling. There are great services available like Amazon’s AWS chatbot that already has complex features built-in, or Google’s AuthO that makes it easy to allow users to login with their social media accounts.
These services allow teams to quickly add functionality to the interface and test a more complete design with users. But, they can quickly add up and might become very expensive after a while. Therefore, it's important to map out which features are more valuable than the time and expertise that it will take to build them, and research if it will be better to outsource their development to other teams, or subscribe to a third party service that could offer your team those APIs. This will take the pressure off the team and allow more time to develop those features as needed.
Concierge MVP
Similar to the Wizzard of Oz approach, we use real people to complete complex functions that we would have needed a lot of code for. Although this is not a great long-term solution, it will make both testing and development much simpler during the early stages of the product’s development.
A common use case for this approach is as a replacement for AI software. Instead of paying money for a chatbot service to simply conduct an early-stage user test, it might be better to give your colleagues a script with common questions and answers that they can manually type into another computer to respond to your participants.
People can also be used to send important information or notifications to a participant’s device during a user test instead of spending a lot of resources on developing a complex backend for a product that hasn’t even been validated yet.
A good MVP is the result of good research and careful planning.
- Find out what users really need. It’s better to spend more time on user and market research to clearly define who your users will be to design towards a more focused and achievable solution for their pain points.
- Keep everyone involved. There are often pitfalls or solutions that are unclear to us without the expertise or experience of other team members.
- Make it visible. When you create artefacts like feature prioritisation matrixes and user flows it becomes much easier to predict what your project will need and plan towards those milestones.
The bottom line.
Whether you’re writing a blog post or developing a new SaaS application, an MVP will make it easier to launch your new product or features early and avoid wasting resources on work that might drain your project or misguide you completely. There will never be a perfect version — the market and our users are always changing. But a real product that users can interact with is the best way to optimise our products and adopt new users that can fund our teams to continue creating great solutions.
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