MVP Development — Whose Product Is It Anyway?
Ever since the book, The Lean Startup, was published in 2011, the MVP, or minimum viable product, has become a key concept for startups all around the world. You can think of an MVP as the shortest product development path to attain validation about a customer base and their needs. Companies use this approach to quickly get up and running with new product ideas and it allows them to test assumptions and pivot quickly.
What makes up a good MVP is different for every product but there are a few tried and true strategies a company can use to help define their scope. The first step here, and what I’ll talk about in this article, is identifying your customer base and incorporating them into the company culture. Secondly, after getting data on customer needs and pain points, look for similarities from your interviews and summarize your findings. Finally, once identified, that customer base should be brought into the planning and testing process as early and often as possible.
Identifying the Customer
One of the first questions a company asks is who the product is being built for. A product can have one or many different customer types throughout the lifespan of the company but for the MVP stage, it’s best to focus on one where you think you can drive the most value first. Generally, it’s a good idea to focus on early adopters when the product is still young. Identify the people in your core market who are influencers and shoot for a premium product offering that will get them talking — more on that later. You will need to directly interview customers extensively in order to be sure you have found the audience which resonates with your product idea.
Capturing What You’ve Learned
After you’ve completed your first rounds of customer interviews, it’s important to boil that data down into some summaries that can be easily referenced and shared with the team. The best tool I’ve seen for this is called the Customer Persona. A Customer Persona is made up of four important parts. The first two are easy — name your persona and physically put a face to the name. We’ll use a bank for this example and one of their core customers, Sally Business Banker. Having a name and face to describe your user humanizes that user and makes the team more empathic to their needs. Next, capture the key activities and interactions you think Sally Business Banker will have with your product. Finally, capture Sally’s pain points, which can also be described as the benefits which are not achieved by other products in the market in your category. These quick, succinct synopses can be easily shared and referenced as you build. Soon, you will find your self asking which persona a feature addresses as you scope new features for your MVP.
Creating an Evangelist
Your early customers should be evangelists for the product and have the most to gain by using the product. One way to turn a typical customer into a product evangelist for your company is to bring them into the planning process. A great tool for this is the agile inception. Used heavily by software development firms and flexible companies alike, the agile inception is a highly collaborative, highly interactive planning session. The output goal here is to end with around three months of product development work, broken out into incremental steps and grouped into key features for the product which make some progress towards company KPIs. I encourage every company to identify one or two core users or potential users of the product and invite them to collaborate in the agile inception process. Doing so makes customers feel a part of the process and have a sense of ownership and pride over what ends up being built, not to mention you’re directly incorporating their feedback and addressing their pain points.
Building a new product can be daunting and there are many things to consider when deciding what goes into it. The most important thing to think about first is who your product should be helping. Some steps to take here are identifying the customer through extensive customer interviews, capturing what you’ve learned using customer personas and finally, turning your core users into evangelists by incorporating them into the planning and testing process. Next time, we’ll talk more about testing assumptions without building anything and paring down scope to fit into the three month window defined by the agile inception.
