Turning a Minimum Viable Product Into a Valuable User Experience

What is a Minimum Viable Product?

A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a small version of a new product that can be used to gather the maximum amount of useful feedback from customers with the least amount of development effort.

An MVP strips out all unnecessary functionality, and includes the bare minimum amount of features in order to get feedback from potential customers.

It’s an established, useful concept that, when utilised correctly, can minimise wasted time in the early stages of defining a product vision and establishing product / market fit.

Rather than spending a large amount of time creating a full product and hoping for traction, you can identify the crucial functionality and build just these features, in order to determine whether to pivot, or to pursue the project.

Choose the audience and scope for your MVP carefully

When you’re looking at creating an MVP, you should have a hypothesis in mind that you’re looking to prove or disprove — essentially, a measurable way of saying whether your MVP succeeded or not.

It’s possible to create a general-purpose MVP to obtain feedback, but the problem is that different types of users have different expectations, motivations and abilities to understand your product vision at an early stage.

Many users can’t see past basic usability issues in an MVP, and will require a refined product to provide useful feedback

Generating useful feedback

Imagine you’ve created a micro-site to test whether your new ‘widget’ works well. If you test your MVP against a broad audience, you’ll probably receive feedback such as:

The site didn’t look great on my iPad

I think the page is a bit dark

Whereas you were actually looking for functional feedback about the widget itself, such as:

The widget worked well but it would be better if it was in a modal

You know that the micro-site doesn’t work well on iPad, but that wasn’t the purpose of the MVP.

Even with explicit instructions to focus on the widget, some users will become distracted with other parts of your MVP, because users have different expertise, interest and expectations.

Testing your MVP against a broad set of users will result in less-specific feedback, and this can waste valuable time and money if you’re trying to focus on one particular area.

You can maximise the quality of the feedback that your MVP generates by targeting it to specific groups or types of users

Creating a valuable experience

Targeting the format of your MVP to users with a specific persona or technical ability can really help to obtain more useful feedback.

For example, at my startup Swiftcomplete, we provide a customisable search engine as a service. If I planned to test a new piece of functionality, I would create a different MVP depending on the user persona:

• Developers — It may be sufficient to create a couple of JSON API endpoints, with examples ready populated in a downloadable Postman collection
• Decision makers — A video of a mocked-up product, with high level benefits, ROI and cost-savings highlighted

Minimum Viable Product vs Minimum Valuable Product

In reality, I would probably break these personas down much further, in order to create a more personalised and valuable experience for the recipient.

For example, I could create a Postman collection specifically designed for Salesforce developers in the manufacturing industry, or a video aimed at councillors to demonstrate how search technology could benefit local libraries.

With a similar amount of work, you can either create a viable experience for a broad set of users, or a valuable experience for a niche, well-defined, specific type of user

The more valuable the experience to a user, the better the quality of feedback, and the more useful the MVP is likely to be.

Avoid creating a general-purpose catch-all MVP if you’re looking for feedback on a specific area of your product.

Summary

Creating an MVP can reduce the time that it takes to validate an idea for a product or functionality.

If you create a one-size-fits-all MVP and send it to a broad audience, you’ll receive a wide range of feedback that may miss the point.

Targeting an MVP to a specific audience creates a valuable experience that results in more specific, actionable feedback, that can be used to determine whether to proceed or pivot at an early stage.

I’m the founder of tech startup Swiftcomplete.

I love talking about product management, startups and technology. If you’d like to hear more, head over to swiftcomplete.com or message me on Twitter @chriswinfielduk or on LinkedIn

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