MVP doesn’t mean the broken product
“Minimum Viable Product” doesn’t mean that the product will be incomplete, unfinished or unpolished.
It’s important to deliver a high-quality experience to your users and invest in sound design. Remember, consider this as a starting point for your product to grow. If you don’t start on with the sufficient features, the user will abandon it even before you have a chance to build out more functionalities. An MVP or minimum viable product has just enough features to get early adopters excited. After launching an MVP, you’ll get a lot of feedback that will help you understand if you have product-market fit and what areas you should invest in next.
There are a lot of different reasons why MVPs are beneficial. Let’s talk a little bit about the benefits of MVPs:
- Get the product to market fast: They allow you to get the product to the market fast or much faster than if you have to build out the entire feature set.
- Get feedback from real users: By launching an early version of your product, you will start to get signals if you have a market fit and additionally you will get a lot of feedback from real users, they can help to inform what you should do next.
- Fail fast: MVP’s allows you to fail fast and learn because this is an iterative approach, you can respond to incoming feedback more efficiently or in the worst case abandon the product without having to spend a lot of money and time to build out the full product.
Creating an MVP:
- Start with the business model canvas: You can start with the “Business Model Canvas” to help define MVP by explicitly looking at customers, the value proposition, channels that you have and the relationship that you want to build with customers. It will help you identify what’s the right problem to solve and right value proposition to create for your customer early on. To this though you need to understand who are your users and give them the reason to use your product.
- Weigh against competing solutions: Once you build the basis for your MVP, you want to compare with the other solutions in the market, perform “Competitive Analysis”. Is it the same? How is it different? Why would the user choose you over a competing product? You want to make sure you have a compelling answer here.
- Make sure it’s aligned with business objectives: Do you have revenue targets? Do you need to launch by a specific date? Are you trying to attract a new user? You need to make sure that your MVP is helping to meet the business objectives whatever they are.
- Translate to requirements: Once you have all these things, then it’s time to breakdown MVP into needs. It is where to make it actionable for the team to execute. It is where you are going to start to dig deep as to what a product does or doesn’t do in more detail. Usually, this means writing PRD’s (Product requirement document). Remember, even though it’s called MVP, it still needs to be a complete product where the user is willing to pay for. It’s imperative to find the right balance in terms of what functionality could go in and how perfect the product feels.
- Identify KPI’s: Consider KPI’s that are directly related to your business objectives. Focus on key few metrics rather than collecting all possible data and try to draw insights that don’t make sense and derail you in the wrong direction. Identify both lagging and leading performance indicators.
Thanks for reading. I hope you have a clear understanding now about the MVP (Minimum Viable Product). From now on, you can drive all the future discussions and make others understand that MVP doesn’t mean the incomplete product, it means a complete set of features which customer is willing to pay for, and you could monetise your product.
