From MVP to full experience
Congratulations, we are almost there :)
We’ve been working harder than ever this quarter doing our research, we discovered things step by step, we established processes and everyone is engaged on our team.
Finally we are all glad of the job we’ve been doing. Well done everyone!
We are now with the board, presenting our job to stakeholders. After thousands of meetings we are getting to the point to build the product.
And tthe feedback from the board:
“Well done with the full experience. Go Team! Let’s just define what we can deliver next month? Think of the MVP.”
I know the feeling :(
Everything started to fall bit by bit. We start to shiver and cry thinking on these three letters M, V & P.
What’s MPV means?
MVP means ‘Minimum Viable Product’ and normally we use this terminology to deliver the minimum product that can achieve certain features — which are often not the essential values to deliver to the customer.
That’s fine and we use it to split our work and it’s a great thing to do it if we are still having in mind to keep the overall experience in our backlog — sadly doesn’t happen in every product :(
What if we tweak it a little bit and we think differently?
What if we agreed within our team to deliver a MVP that includes ‘Minimum VALUABLE Product’ and we all agree what this minimum value should be?
If we have that, then we can continue with our job getting small values until we achieve the BIG value we supposed to deliver to the customer. (Read more about it in our article ‘Being Agile and getting your development team onboard’).
We have to admit that the most exciting part of our job is to create the TO-BE experience.
How the step by step should be? What are we going to deliver to our customers? How are we going to make it? Which channels are we going to touch/ change in order to make it happen? and so on.
Once we’d defined it we should use maps to show and share this future experience to our board/ stakeholders — people who is going to buy our project and sign it off.
Use storyboards to show and reflect the overall experience. They can be drawing to show the main channels you are planning to act on.
If we are passion enough to be good designers and we advocate for our customers we should get ahead about thinking on next steps.
We know board always think on MVP first. Having this in mind, think on possible ways to build a structure to support the VALUEs on it — not just a set of features.
Here I took a good example from Internet from IBM Watson.
Simple, very simple. Let’s work around testing.
If we convince our team — and so the board — about the importance of the testing then half of our work is done here.
Testing is an essential piece in our work which will define the ‘following value’ we are thinking on deliver to. If we fail we will be still on time to change it early enough to rethink on the following ‘value’.
Basically, we need a VALUE to test. If we don’t have it we cannot test the product and so then we are on a high risk to fail.
Once we have tested the MPV — minimum valuable product — and if everything is right on track then we can think on the next step.
Our projects are our babies and we need to mind them. So, keep your job tidy, plan a lot and make sure you follow up the development process until you have the values delivered.
Advocate for your customers, continue being a great designer and share the love with the community. We are here to help you :)
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Originally published at blog.prototypr.io on November 25, 2017.
