4 Ways to Future-Proof Your MVP
Building an MVP allows you quickly test your business ideas, get feedback from early adopters, and improve the product before the final release.
You can also use an MVP as a basis for your future product and thus save time on development. But to do it, you must pay attention to properties that might not be essential for an MVP but will be vital for full-scale software.
What is MVP?
An MVP is a version of a new product that has sufficient features to satisfy early adopters or potential investors. Its main goals are to:
- Test business ideas
- Receive feedback from end users and investors
- Incorporate users’ opinion into the development
Since the MVP only needs to be usable and provide early adopters with a basic idea of what the product does, it includes the most necessary functionalities, properties, and design features of the final product.
Why should you future-proof your MVP?
Future-proofing your MVP helps to ensure that the product developed at this stage will be useful even after showing it to early adopters. Here are the key reasons to future-proof your MVP:
- Successfully turn your MVP into a full-scale product. When you take into account future product requirements while building the MVP, you can use it as a basis for building a full-scale product instead of starting it from scratch. This way, you can save overall development time.
- Avoid changes to the architecture and frameworks. These elements are the foundation of both the MVP and the final software. The further down the development process you go, the more challenging and costly it is to make changes to this foundation. But what’s good enough for the MVP may be nowhere near enough for the final software.
- Ensure product quality from the start. While developing your MVP with future software requirements in mind may slow things down, it can help you ensure the quality of your product in the long run. You won’t need to worry about the product’s performance under a heavy load, ways to add new functionalities, and software security.
Ways for future-proofing your MVP: Implement scaling options for future high loads
An MVP usually doesn’t have a lot of users since it’s only created to test a business idea. That is why development team may prioritize functional testing over performance and load testing. But once you release the final product to a broad audience, you may face both performance and load issues.
How to avoid overload and performance issues?
When designing the architecture for your MVP, make sure it supports horizontal scaling so you can easily scale from an MVP to a bigger solution. Horizontal scaling allows you to scale your system endlessly, but you’ll need to add new infrastructure elements like a load balancer.
This approach is more flexible and cost-effective than vertical scaling, which adds more computing power to existing instances. Vertical is an expensive way of scaling that is limited by the amount of hardware you can add to existing machines.
Ways for future-proofing your MVP: Use flexible frameworks for adding new features
When moving from an MVP to a full-scale product, the old development approach may lead to high support costs and slow development since developers have to do everything by hand instead of using dedicated tools. Alternatively, the team has to rewrite the old code using modern UI frameworks such as React.js or Angular.
How to avoid inflexibility due to framework lock-in?
Consider using common development frameworks from the beginning of work on the MVP, even if it may seem unnecessary. Such frameworks will allow you to simplify adding new functionalities in the future even if these functionalities don’t match the original product vision.
Ways for future-proofing your MVP: Ensure security from the start
Security is always critical, even during MVP development. Security issues during the MVP demonstration may create reputational problems, scare off investors, or even cause the termination of the project.
How to secure an MVP?
Determine the core security mechanisms your final product must have and make sure to build your MVP with these mechanisms in mind.
In this way, you ensure the protection of your product at all development stages and avoid the risk of experiencing a security breach at release or scaring off investors.
Ways for future-proofing your MVP: Keep detailed and consistent project documentation
When moving from an MVP to the final product, the project usually gets a new, much bigger scope and needs a bigger development team, or even several teams. If the technical documentation is poor, new team members will spend a lot of time investigating the existing code.
How to make an MVP clear for newcomers?
Keeping detailed technical documentation should be part of the usual development process from the start of the project. Documentation should include:
- A product description
- The product’s business goals and values
- Functional and non-functional requirements
- Architectural overview
- Feature list and feature specifications
- Development standards
Final thoughts
When developing MVP for your product, keep in mind core requirements for the final product. It may be new features, scalability, or security measures. Doing so allows you to save time and your project’s budget when shifting from MVP to full-scale development.
