Why Bringing Your MVP to Perfection Is a Lousy Way to Release a Product

[Why] trying to make an ideal MVP (or product version) instead of just launching it ASAP can screw everything up.

You have chosen an idea for your product or service and moved on to another important stage: creating and checking an MVP. But you really stuck there.

You are running yourself ragged in attempt to sharpen your product, improve design & user experience, and embellish it with small features. As a result, an MVP release is suspended every now and again.

Ask yourself: is it that important? Is it worth stalling?

The obvious answer is NO.

Customers may not even notice that beautiful button or amazing dropdown list display speed you were working on for a week. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking and while you are deifying an MVP, which is the fruit of an outstanding idea that came to your mind, this idea may come to someone else’s mind and they won’t bear around the bush and will roll out a similar product on the market.

Besides, an MVP is all about minimalism, so utilizing all frills, you contradict the very nature of a saleable product version with a minimum sufficient set of useful features.

Furthermore, MVP is an integral part of the lean startup methodology that advocates releasing an MVP and collecting customer feedback to tailor a product or service to their specific demands and avoid investing time in unnecessary features.

However, by and large, this concept applies not only to MVPs but also to regularly updated software products (for example, data security solutions where each new version helps to reduce emerging security risks).

Bringing your product version to perfection may get you nowhere. Wasting time on redundant features, you are lagging behind your competitors that release one version after another in accordance with customer needs and based on market conditions at a point in time.

What is more, you are losing customer loyalty: you have been making promises for months, while your clients have kept up with subscription payments. Finally, you release an incredible MVP or a perfect product version — and all of a sudden, your clients do not need all these bells and whistles.

There are two pills: the red one and the blue one.

• The red one is a super cool product version where everything is thought out down to the very last detail. At the same time, the majority of the features are superfluous and your customers simply do not need them, not to mention the delay in the release of your product.
• The blue pill is a high-quality version with features enough to show the full might of your product, and released on time.

Which one would you choose?

Hope that on the basis of the foregoing, you will make the right choice.

Last important thing: take a look at a brief guide to stick to when working on an MVP or product version.

1) Focus your efforts on the most significant features that form the basis of your product.

2) When all planned features are developed, engage quality assurance engineers.

3) As soon as all bugs are fixed, provide the MVP or updated product version to potential customers or your clients accordingly.

4) Collect customer feedback on the product or its updated version.

5) Make the needed changes to the product if they are:

• critical

or

• quick fixes.

6) Keep in mind the wishes of clients and implement needed features in the future.

Good luck!

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