Agile MVP Development
According to the survey by Small Business Trends, “Only 2 in 5 startups are profitable, and other startups will either break even (1 in 3) or continue to lose money (1 in 3).” One of the reasons why startups are mostly prone to failure is False Starts. Tom Eisenmann, the author of “Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success”, reflects upon the reason for false starts out of the six patterns of startup failure he identified in his book.
Eisenmann writes that entrepreneurs who claim to adopt lean startup methodology fail to actually fully accept it. These entrepreneurs are in a rush to release the product and misinterpret the rhetoric of the lean startup movement such as, “launch early and often” and “fail fast”. They neglect to research their target audience’s needs and identify the consumer pain points. The founders fall prey to the ‘you build it, they will come’ mentality. This results in making their huge investments in MVPs that are likely to come to naught. And hence the false starts.
From Concept to Functioning MVP
An idea is the first step of a startup journey. In my blog “Getting Started? Build Your MVP” — I highlighted the power of MVP. A great idea developed into the MVP with the right approach and tools can skyrocket your software or SaaS business.
In simple terms, a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is an imperfect product. It carries just enough features to attract and satisfy the early users and receive feedback for its further development and testing until the final ‘perfect’ product is out.
Creating and testing MVP helps to save time and capital. It helps to define the viability of your idea and provides multiple benefits that can keep you away from the list of failed startups. So if you have a great business idea, and look for support in building the MVP for your product, check out this software development company.
Go Agile
The global technology shift requires adopting new ways to develop a product or service — say no to the traditional processes and embrace agile which is more efficient and flexible. As a founder, you need to find out better ways to enhance your digital or non-digital products/services. The agile methodology is the quintessence of building better products with iterative development. Agile focuses on the consumers or end-users, with the emphasis on understanding their needs and mindsets. The model has an objective to work on an early prototype to get it into customers’ hands such as to receive their feedback and then iterate and refine the product or service over the passage of time. The agile approach is significant to deliver value to the end-users, explore better ways to continuously improve through feedback, and build products and services that the customers actually want.
Now let’s shed light on ways you can use to build your MVP agile.
5-steps to creating MVP in Agile
1. Identify the problem
Market research is most important. After all, you’re building the product for the customers. Once you have analyzed your target audience, define your consumer problems. Think of what problems they are undergoing, conduct interviews and surveys to identify the pain points they are experiencing.
Writing in the Harvard Business Review, “Entrepreneurs should conduct a competitive analysis, including user testing of existing solutions, to understand the strengths and shortcomings of rival products.”
2. Analyze the consumer mindset
Agile lays stress on the consumer mindset. Prior to entering the customer development phase, study consumer behavior to gauge if your idea can actually attract them, understand their expectations, what percent of people will be ready to buy your product, why will they reject and etc.
3. Collaborate with the right team
You don’t need to find millions of developers but enough people who are the right fit and would love to work with you in the process. You can share the narrative of your experience that you’re trying to give to the users and gain their insights and perceptions, and vice versa. Flexible collaboration is impactful when working towards building MVP.
4. Build on the consumer needs via your product core features
It’s time to unpack your concept and your market research and consumer understanding into getting started. However, remember as Eisenmann said in his book, that founders waste a lot of time and money in building a product or service that no one wants and their MVP misses the mark. In this stage, focus on the core features of your product that provide a solution, rest can be built over time via iterative quick cycles.
5. Put your MVP to test
Don’t worry about not having the perfect design or wireframe to be delivered, just present your idea to the end-users if you have taken the above steps seriously. For example, the founder of Dropbox started the company by iterating their product much quicker to test what customers really wanted, early and often. Just in 15 months, Dropbox jumped from 100,000 registered users to over 4,000,000. The key was that they were disciplined to the agile process and tried it consistently to refine their product and make it better and better.
In a nutshell, agile is a powerful system that organizations can use with the right tools and applications most relevant to their needs for agility across all their activities, whether it is writing user stories, release planning, iteration planning, standups, product planning — keep in consideration to keep minimum bugs, be consistent with who’s prioritizing what and whose roles are what, ensuring small releases, small deployed time, small test build time, doing lots of split testings and refactoring where there’s a need to.
Agile is not a bunch of thumb rules, once your right team is using the right tools, the process becomes all-natural, and if you need help with it so developers at Psmorfia can build you MVP using Agile methodologies.
Sounds interesting? Book a free consultation for your next idea!
