Is Your MVP Turning Into a Monster? 👾

monster MVP

In the world of digital products, the user experience (UX) is the key to ensuring maximising adoption. To create a fantastic UX that lasts throughout your product’s life, you need a well-thought-out strategy for how users interact with it. This involves understanding the specific steps users take to achieve their goals within your product, whether it’s creating an account, finding the right item, or completing a purchase.

Two Main Paths to Success

There are two primary approaches you can take when developing your product:

1. Complete User Experience Design — MVP Scope Later: This method emphasises crafting the entire user journey upfront. This includes designing how the product looks, how users navigate through it, and even creating detailed models of the final experience. Once the full user experience is designed, you identify the Minimum Viable Product (MVP), the most basic version that still delivers core value to users. This approach is ideal when you have a clear vision for the product’s overall look and feel and want to ensure a cohesive design from the start. It’s also a good fit for complex products with intricate user journeys.
2. MVP Scope First: In this approach, you jump right into defining the MVP, outlining the essential features and functionalities needed to get a basic product into users’ hands quickly. This allows you to gather valuable feedback from real users, which then guides further development efforts. This approach is well-suited for products with a higher degree of uncertainty, where you need to test the market and learn from users before investing too much UX work in specific features. It’s also a great choice when you need to launch quickly.

Choosing Your Path

The right path for your product depends on your specific goals and circumstances:

• Complete User Experience Design: Choose this option if you have a crystal-clear vision for the product’s look and feel and want to ensure a polished experience from day one.
• MVP Scope First: Choose this if you need to validate your product idea quickly, get user feedback early, or if you’re working with a product where user input is crucial for shaping its direction.

Product Stages Within the User Journey

No matter which path you choose, each element of the user journey has its own life cycle. This includes initial testing, the MVP stage, and subsequent Minimum Viable Improvements (MVIs), which are incremental upgrades based on user feedback.

In a fast-paced development environment, it’s crucial to maintain a clear overview of your entire application. This helps you make informed decisions about where to focus your development efforts next.

The Dangers of Perpetual MVPs: The MVP Monster

Be cautious of keeping your product in the MVP stage indefinitely, constantly adding new MVPs on top of the existing ones. This can harm the overall user experience and negatively impact user retention and conversions. Here’s why:

• Technical Debt: Building on a shaky foundation creates a backlog of technical issues that become harder to address over time.
• Forgotten Core Features: Constantly adding new features can lead to neglecting the core functionalities that initially attracted users.
• Inconsistent User Experience: Adding features without a cohesive plan can lead to a fragmented user experience, causing confusion and frustration.

How to Manage and Track Product Stages

Amazon.com homepage example

1. Identify the Paths and Pieces: Start by mapping out the different paths users take within your product, breaking it down into smaller components or “micro-frontends.”
2. Track Changes: Implement a system to track how these micro-frontends evolve over time, recording updates, improvements, and new features. The best approach to track these changes is to generate inside the source code and feed your repository.
3. Link with Your Ticketing System: Connect this tracking system with your issue-tracking software to see how changes to the micro-frontends correlate with user feedback and reported issues.
4. Create a Record: Maintain a detailed record of how each micro-frontend progresses through its life cycle, including the date, stage (MVP, MVI, etc.), and lessons learned along the way. Take a look at this example: Registry and Report.

Taking the First Step: Begin by analysing your existing product and identifying the current stage of each micro-frontend. Then, start tracking these changes systematically, making it a regular part of your development process. Understanding where each module and micro-front end is will help you make more inform decisions on where to focus your development focus.

Recommendation:

1. Avoid Stacking MVPs: This emphasizes the importance of understanding a feature’s stability before further iteration.
2. Proactive Platform Analysis:

• Regularly analyze (e.g., weekly) the status of all functionalities to identify those still in MVP and requiring iteration.
• This analysis helps prioritize development efforts by understanding which features need the most attention.

3. Integrate Feature Lifecycle Data into Roadmaps:

• Include information about dependencies between modules and micro-frontends.
• This transparency helps prioritize development efforts by considering the maturity of each component.

4. Create Usability and Technical Debt Tickets:

• These tickets track functionality gaps and technical issues, aiding prioritization decisions.
• Consider using a ticketing system with severity levels (e.g., high, medium, low) for further prioritization.

5. Set Clear Graduation Criteria for MVPs:

• Define metrics (e.g., user engagement, conversion rate) and user feedback to determine when an MVP has achieved its goals and is ready for further development.
• This prevents features from lingering in an MVP state indefinitely.

Don’t allow your product to become an MVP monster.