Is MVP Dead? What You Should Know about MVP and MAP
For those who didn’t know MVP=Minimum Viable Product.
Is it dead? Well, a lot of product guys say so. Let’s see for ourselves.
“Viable” means that the product is good enough to be sold. If the product has got enough features to satisfy the initial users, then it’s most probably an MVP.
This is a simple definition. But a lot of people understand it differently. For some people, MVP is a product with a few features that can be perfected and then sold. For some people, an MVP is a product that has got a few essential features and actually works and can solve some kind of a problem.
Lean Startup author Eric Ries gives a commonly accepted MVP definition, describing MVP as:
a version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learnings about customers with the least effort.
So, what is MVP? Is it something that provides the product team with enough data to create the actual saleable product or it IS the saleable product?
Actually, there was a time when MVP was quite the thing, and people could even sell a poorly designed product which had only a few features in place. Have things changed now? Yes, they have! And the problem is that users are now expecting more from the newly-launched products. A few years ago, you could enter the market with 3–4 cool features, and you could win people’s hearts. Now, you have to comply with the users’ expectations. They now expect specific integrations, fancier design, better usability.
Users don’t just expect a good product, a viable product. They expect something that will surprise them. They want an MAP or an MLP, i.e., either a Minimum Awesome Product or a Minimum Loveable Product.
BOOM! Seems like you are facing yet another challenge, makers, aren’t you? App users have become more educated. It’s becoming harder and harder to impress them and to make them buy a product or a service. You cannot impress a person with your photo editing app anymore since they have PicsArt, Photoshop Express, VSCO, Adobe Lightroom, etc. You cannot impress them with yet another fin-tech app since they have Robinhood, Tilt, Mint, etc.
What to do then?
You have to reconsider your product strategy. Instead of MVP, you now have to come up either with an MLP or an MAP. These two can actually make the user go for the product and buy it. The formula is pretty simple — the user has to fall in love with your product. How to achieve this? This isn’t going to be easy, but you can at least take into account the steps below:
Step 1: Decide on the core function that your product provides
This was true with the MVP as well. Nothing has changed here. Your product SHOULD, by all means, solve a problem. It should never be a pile of numerous useless features. That’s not what users are expecting to get. So make sure you do your research, you find the pain points of your potential users, and you build a product that has got a core function of solving a problem.
Step 2: Hire a good designer or create a really cool design yourself
This one contradicts the concept of MVP. An MVP does not have to be carefully designed. It should have the core features and a minimum design. But with an MLP or an MAP, the design is paramount, and by design, I mean both User Interface and User Experience. Of course, you cannot design a perfect product on day one, but you can gather feedback and improve the design over time.
Step 3: Act fast
This one is connected with the user feedback. You need to gather user feedback, to take it seriously and to act fast when it comes to implementing the changes. A lot of product teams get stuck in the middle of implementation of new features or new design. This is a problem that a lot of teams face nowadays. And it has a lot of root causes like poor estimation of time and resources, poor team communication, poor product management and so on, so forth. These are internal problems that need to be addressed instantly otherwise the product won’t survive.
Summing up
Now that you know the difference between an MVP and an MAP/MLP, you have to roll up your sleeves and go build an awesome product that impresses people and has them hitting the App Store and Google Play for downloads.
Good luck, builders!
If you enjoyed this article, please hit that clap button to help others find it.
I am an Internet Entrepreneur with extensive experience in product management, software engineering, business operations, and strategy. And I am also the co-founder and CEO of CodeTrace, which is a real-time skills-assessment software that measures developer’s experience based on their code.
Follow me: Medium | Twitter | LinkedIn
Other articles by me:
This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by 335,210+ people.
Subscribe to receive our top stories here.
