Why to Throw a Product Over the Wall? Try MVP to Measure Its Potential

This time we have something very interesting for all those entrepreneurs who are planning to develop or re-engineer their mobile apps in the upcoming days. And of course, if you already own a quality mobile app, then you can consider this guide for future reference.

Few months back, I was discussing “Picit” project, developed by Intuz, with our product manager to understand what the app all about and its industry best features. It was the first time; I came to know about the term “Minimum Viable Product” (MVP).

As it was a completely new subject for me, I asked for brief information on MVP. And thanks to our Product Manager who guided me on what it is, why is it required, and how should it be done. Here ‘s all that I learnt.

What is Minimum Viable Product?

Let’s understand the term by analyzing each word it contains.

Minimum suggests to develop the app as little as possible to save time, efforts and money.

Viable specifies that the product must have prime elements to deliver a realistic experience to the customers. It enables users to believe that they are responding to an authenticated product.

Product indicates refinement or completeness of the app that is going to be delivered to the users.

Why One Should Opt for MVP?

Stay Focused to Core Value Propositions

Value propositions differentiate you from the competitors. While developing MVP, be clear about the core values you want to deliver to genuine customers. Move ahead for mobile app MVP development by considering pre-decided elements. Don’t to create a mess by introducing unnecessary features. It ends up by increasing complexity of the app.

Cost Efficiency

MVP requires to design and develop the product with basic features and functionalities. Launch the first version for testing to a small group of users as earlier as possible. Here you need to invest less time and efforts in compared to developing a complete mobile app.

Analyze and understand users’ behavior while they are operating the app. Identify the features that attract them maximum, collect their feedback to find out what additions they are looking for, and iterate product accordingly.

Repeat this process to move ahead with highly precise development scopes that requires minimum efforts and eventually lessen money.

Faster Time-to-Market

Development of a full-fledged product takes too long to launch. Building a prototype product, you can have the flexibility to modify it as per users’ requirements. After creating the first version of MVP, you can easily implement the idea, analyze users concerns, make corrections, and again launch the product for real-time testing. This can be possible in a very fast fashion. It enables you to learn from your mistakes, release iterations quickly and improve time-to-market of the product.

Build Up A Desirable Product

Deliver an excellent product to the user base with all key aspects they are expecting. People happily pay if they find your product is providing incredible values to them that your rivals don’t. Well, no one is going to pay for a cluttered experience.

Rather than targeting to mass, try to approach early adopters and start building a user base for your mobile app. In a practice of interacting with the mass, there are chances you can be stuck and confused due to the bombard of questions and suggestions.

With a specific target audience, you can move efficiently. Early adopters of the app share their feedback on required additions and validate your value propositions. They also appreciate positive factors of your product. Thus, start communicating with the sensible community and market for your final product.

Iterate Your Marketing Efforts

Early launch of product prototype allows you to test your marketing and sales approaches. No matter how fantastic product you have, but if it is not marketed and promoted properly, it cannot gain popularity amongst the target audience. It also aids in verifying your business model assumptions on customer lifetime value and customer acquisition cost.

What is Required to Achieve Success Through MVP?

Comprehensive Market Research

Market research is the primary need for any product launch. Being an owner, you must be aware of current trends of your industry, market leaders, your competitors and their services/products. It helps in deciding significant features for the MVP and defining your product’s way to success.

For example; if you are dealing with less competitive industry such as laundry services, not having an online payment option in your mobile app doesn’t matter a lot. On the other hand, if you are dealing with e-commerce industry, you cannot run your business competently without offering online payment facility to the consumers.

Identify Must-Need Features

It is very obvious that every new mobile app must be competitive with the current market trends. To achieve the advanced standards, entrepreneurs are getting more demanding and ask for extra features development that is not mentioned in the scopes. It hampers the entire product development life cycle and development team too.

Usually, development of MVP takes 2–3 months. Then, it launches for testing to a group of people who validate the app efficiency and share their feedback. It can take approx. 1 month. In general scenario, your market will not experience any significant change within the time period of 3 to 4 months. And if any major changes are there, MVP allows you to cover quickly in very next version of your product.

So, be patient and go ahead with your pre-decide features. You only need to try out is deliver an error free MVP to the selected users.

Keep Design Realistic

When it comes to design part, you insist on having an attractive design to woo users. But the purpose of MVP is not to attract the users, but to check out the future scopes for the final product. It enables you to decide whether the full-fledged product works effectively or not. Share the MVP product with a small user group and collect their feedback, it will help you in designing a better mobile app with more creativity.

Now you must be clear about why MVP is important before launching your final product. Having exclusive experience in working with diversified industry domains, Intuz suggests MVP approach to the clients for quick and quality mobile app development. By launching the first version of the mobile app sooner, we improve the product side by side as per users’ recommendations and deliver them a perfect product.

Image Credit: Braintree

Originally published at blog.intuz.com on January 13, 2017.