Minimum Viable Product: 4 Steps to Making it Right
You don’t have to build a product from scratch and well into the very final touch to see whether it will be a success or a failure. Things just don’t work like that. MVPs have been around for quite a while, but many clients still struggle to see why an MVP is essential to product success.
Somehow, the answer lies in the name “Minimum Viable Product” itself. Viability means providing the user with enough value so that they want to use your product. They may not want to become paying users, but they still are willing to give it a try over dozens of other products available in the market. What matters here is finding the right balance between viability and keeping things minimalist. This way, you test and validate ideas early on, spending time and resources on product ideas and features that are going to perform. And so you do this more easily, we have created some guidelines to help you along the way:
1. Narrow Down the Personas
When building a new product, you definitely do your research first: studying the market, talking to potential clients, singling out the personas. However, when creating an MVP, you can’t focus on all the personas at once, you can’t make your product solve all issues for all people. Instead, focus on building a solution for a very limited number of the personas that cover one full flow and see how it all pans out.
If you feel like it’s necessary to cover all of your user personas in the MVP, there’s something wrong, either with the personas you have identified, or your perception of MVP. Generally, your personas should represent rather varying groups of people, and these cannot be covered in a single MVP. Rather, your MVP will minimize the risks by validating your assumptions early on, before you’ve invested heavily into design and development. It’s better to land the market quickly, and make changes by learning from your existing users rather than working with a huge group of users that won’t get you anywhere.
A good example is Uber, that only released its app for city commuters initially. The concepts of rides for large groups (UberXL), price-conscious commuters (UberPool) and sharing rides (Fare Splitting) came forward much later, and were driven by the needs of real-time users.
In this sense, the MVP is a good way of making the users your voice, and tell you what to build next.
2. Needs vs. Wants
Now that you have picked one persona to proceed with, it’s time to pick the features you are going to develop. Here we have the same issue as with choosing the persona- it’s important to not wander off the path you have chosen. Start by asking yourself and the team this question for each feature in mind: “Does the user need this feature to use the product and solve their issues or do they want this feature.”
In the first case, the features are essential to solving the very issue that lays in the basis of your product, and in the second case, they are nice-to-have features that the users would find useful, but can very well do without.
For example, if you are running a delivery app, things like picking a location, providing details on the time of delivery, and the like are necessary features, while seeing the photo of the delivery-man is a nice, but not crucial feature.
Image source: Devbridge
From Minimum Viable Product to Minimum Lovable Product
Defining the features that your users need is right, but you don’t want to serve a product without any dressing. A good MVP is one that covers all the needs, and just enough of the wants that the end users have. This is essential to validating if the end users will actually stick to what you’ve come up with. Choose wants that will make a difference to your users and set you apart from your competition- a minimum lovable product, that is!
3. Consider time to market
Your product may be a breakthrough, it may offer something the market hasn’t yet seen, or may be an improved version of well-known products. And whichever category you fall into, it’s crucial to cut down the time to market, and be there a day sooner rather than later. Therefore, when it comes to the wants of your users, you may want to concentrate on the features that are quicker and easier to deliver, simultaneously maintaining the value they add.
The same goes about design: try not to over-complicate it. The coolest designs will take quite a while to create, and the development team will spend more time on building them. So, better stick to something cool yet simple!
4. Continue to Iterate
The release of your MVP is just the beginning. What you want to do here is continue to iterate by including new features from other personas to create MVP with Minimum Viable Features (MVF). These can be grouped into separate MVPs to set, so your market-ready product will be a combination of a couple of MVPs with well-tested and validated features.
Keep up getting the most out of your budget and capacity, and keep up the hard work to achieve greater things ahead!
About this author:
Armine Hakobyan is a digital storyteller with a heart for technology and innovation.
