How To Develop An Effective MVP For Your Product

Making a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a sure-fire way to understand the product — market fit at an early stage. It also serves in finding out how the product is received by your primary users.

So how do you go along making one?

Here is check-list of steps to help you launch a successful MVP:

Identify your core and complementary features

What is that one basic, core idea that you want to offer your client? What problem of theirs are you solving? Defining this is very important. This will be the fountainhead from which your MVP will spring.

Along with the core features, include only those additional features that help your product serve the user with a seamless user experience. It’s a minimum viable product. So, it is highly imperative to keep it minimum.

As you develop your MVP, you might be inspired to add more functionalities that would differentiate you from competition or make your product look more attractive to your target audience. However, it is essential to draw out only the core features for faster and more effective test cycles.

Invest in user and competition research

You have an idea that you think is revolutionary but is there any demand for it in the market? Are there consumers who will want to use your product? Is your product similar to other products already available in the market?

It is important to carry out some research that would effectively answer the above questions. Many efforts and resources have been wasted by organisations that started building products without due diligence on user and competition research.

Also, knowing who your customers are and what their needs are will give you a solid foundation to build your MVP. Narrowing down your audience as much as possible in the MVP stage would provide leverage to faster product development and test cycles.

Define user flow

What steps does the client/user have to take to get to your product’s primary goal? What actions does the user perform in your software/app to solve his problem?

It is essential to be clear on each step and action. At this stage, making a user flow/demo video of your product and sharing it with potential users could benefit you in the long run in identifying which functionalities they are most likely to use.

Choose the right management method to engineer the MVP

Assuming that you already have a competent workforce in place, it is important to set up a proper project management system. This is to ensure that the team can work efficiently and there is no confusion, owing to miscommunication about product goals or team responsibilities.

Many start-upsmight not have in place the workforce required to engineer the MVP. Besides, the existing employees might be already engaged in other projects or products/services. Therefore, it is imperative to find the right product outsourcing partner to help you with building the MVP and with go-to market strategies.

Ensure high quality, especially in MVP

When the first iPhone was launched, it did not include copy/paste function. The users complained to Apple about it. Apple’s response was that the feature had not yet been perfected; therefore they chose not to include it.

The basic philosophy is, nothing half-baked should be included in the product. MVP involves only limited amount of features. It is essential to ensure that those features work perfectly without any glitches.

Build for scalability

Now that your MVP is a success, what are your next steps?

Make sure your MVP can be expanded to quickly reach more number of people if it attracts users and becomes successful. It would help your cause to choose lean and fast methodologies with existing, useful resources.

In short, it is necessary to be prepared to fail fast but it is also equally necessary to be prepared for success by building your MVP with scalability.

In conclusion

The point of an MVP is to gain maximum feedback with minimum effort in the least amount of time possible.

Overly simplified, MVP is a means to get feedback from users on your product ideas. You must make arrangements for the efficient collection of feedback so that you can make a decision about the future of the product and act accordingly.

So that’s it! A typical day in my life as a data scientist at High Peak Software. A day full of learning, work and fun!

If you’d like to publish us in your publication, please reach out to us at marketing@highpeaksw.com

Written and edited by Radhika Madhavan at High Peak Software.