Couple Design Thinking & Lean for your MVP

‘Because a half-arsed MVP teaches you nothing’

Probably the most misunderstood concept in lean startup methodology is the ‘MVP’. This is pretty worrying as it’s also the one area you want to get right if you’re having a crack at running lean, something most of todays startups and even big corporates are now trying out. Let’s figure out why…

Quick summary of an MVP: A minimum viable product is the the most stripped down version of a product that provides a vehicle for validating a business idea. Here are the fundamentals of a good MVP:

• It has just enough value that people are willing to use it or buy it
• It provides a feedback loop to guide product and business decisions

In other words it needs to deliver just enough of a desired outcome for people to want to sign up and use it (or even pay for it!) and most importantly provide you with enough data to base product and business decisions on.

TIP: Don’t get hung up on the word ‘data’, this can, and most probably will be qualitative data like user interviews and feedback.

So if we know delivering value is a minimum, usability is a minimum, producing data is a minimum — what’s all the confusion about? Two bullet points is not rocket science (unless your product is a rocket).

The issue is that people hear ‘ship it fast and get something in the hands of the user’ and believe MVP must actually stand for ‘quickly release a shitty landing page or poorly designed prototype that benefits no one’. I’m pretty sure this is not what Eric Reis had in mind.

You don’t decide what is viable, the user does.

Wait! An MVP is a quick experiment to validate a hypothesis so it’s ok to be wrong, right? Wrong. Well actually sort of right but you don’t want to set yourself up to be wrong. That would be a big waste of effort which is pretty much the polar opposite of lean. Eric Karjaluoto has a good take on this here in which he makes the point that even viable ideas that get executed poorly due to being half baked ‘quick experiments’ are subsequently dropped by the founder as they were seen as not viable. This is not a good way to spend your time and not very lean startup.

Design thinking can lend a hand to lean — you’re not breaking any rules using both.

There are steps before the MVP that you should be thinking about to try and figure out what is going to be the minimum you can release to maximise the chances of reaching viability. Steps like user research, rapid prototyping, user testing — basically good design practices that can ensure your minimal effort is close enough to viable and delivering on your value proposition. This can be the difference between validating a good idea and giving up on one because of false data.

An MVP is not a license to be rubbish, it’s your first crack at getting your users to love you.

Something I believe people really miss is that you should be aiming to delight the user even in an MVP. As Ben Pujji (CMO of atomic) rightly said — “an MVP that fails to elicit even a shred of delight from customers is the early warning sign that an MVP is designed to discover”. You want users to not only sign up but actually use and repeat using your product to produce enough continued data, right? People won’t continue to use something that feels hollow or delivers no value to them but if you get them to not only use it but actually enjoy using it and forming habits through delight, that’s validation and viability right there!

Agree? Disagree? I like writing to start conversations, not to preach so please do share your opinions and experiences.