What is an MVP and how to define it? Do you know what can happen if you wait until your product is 100% done to make it go public? The time is spent, the budget is spent, but it turns out that people don’t actually need the things that you’ve built.
In todays post I’m going to talk about a minimum viable product, aka MVP. To understand what an MVP really is and what it’s meant to do, let’s take a look at the popular car metaphor.
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MVP Metaphor: How to build a minimum viable product?
Imagine you have a customer who says I need something to help me to get from one destination to another faster. The first example is what you should not do when developing an MVP. Businesses sometimes get iterative product development wrong. They think building an MVP means they can deliver an unfinished product.
That’s how you keep showing how of the vehicle to your customer until you finally present them what they expected to see. This process is lengthy and money consuming. Most importantly, it will not give you any real user feedback. As a result, you’ve built whole car in false assumptions that may not reflect with your customers true needs.
Now lets take a look at the second example. With a skateboard.
A customer still needs something to get from one destination to another. But after some brainstorming and development, your team shows up to the customer with a skateboard. The simplest thing they could come up with. This skateboard is your MVP. It has basic functionality to get you from point a to point b. It is fast to build, it doesn’t require a big budget, and most importantly, it allows you to learn what people think about using it.
But skateboard might not be something that your customers expected to see. And that’s okay. It’s just your first iteration. Your goal at this stage is not to satisfy 100% of people, but to get the real feedback. So you gather the feedback and discover that people may find it hard to balance on the skateboard.
In the next iteration, you solve this problem and deliver a scooter. Customers keep using your scooter and this time you learn they want to travel long distances, but the wheels are too small for this. You keep iterating again and again and again until you deliver a car and your customers are happy this way. After a long journey, this keyboard evolved into a car.
In fact, depending on the customers needs that you keep discovering along the way, you can end up with a bike, a bus, or even a spaceship. So when you develop a product. Try to find your skateboard first here. I mean something small and fast to build that. You can give it to real users and get real feedback. And that’s what MVP is all about.
Minimum viable product explained
MVP is a basic version of the product made to validate product idea and attract early adopters.
MVP doesn’t mean bad or low quality. It should bring value to the customer, solve their main problems and provide a consistent user experience. Companies use MVP’s to test their ideas and to understand if someone is ready to pay for it. It helps them to launch quickly, enter the market with a small budget, collect maximum quality feedback, find the product market fit and generate additional revenue. But you don’t necessarily have to code your minimum viable product. It may come with various forms.
Example of Airbnb
Let’s see how well known companies started their way as MVP’s the founders of of Airbnb, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia wanted to help people to rent accommodations directly from the landlords.
But they had to make sure that people will prefer their service over the traditional one, the hotel rooms. So Brian and Joe created a simple showcase website and filled it with photos of their own apartment. There were no payments, no map view, it’s just minimalistic websites and it was enough to validate the idea. Brian and Joe got their first clients and understood to which direction to move further. From the very beginning.
Example of Buffer
It was important for Joel Gascoigne, the CEO of Buffer, to create a product that brings value. He built an MVP that looked like a landing page with a product description, a list of features and several pricing plans. If a visitor picked a plan, a notification would pop up and offer them to join the waiting list. Next, the team reached out to people from the waiting list to ask them about their needs and expectations.
Example of Uber
This way, getting closer to a perfect market fit Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick, the founders of Uber, noticed a problem. It was difficult and expensive to find a cab in a rush in San Francisco. To quickly launch the service to market, they created a simple iOS app that helped with two collect those who want to get the right with drivers and allow payments with the credit card systems. There were no reviews, no driver tracking, no payment automation, but these two features solved the users problems well. With this MVP, Garrett and Travis launched their business quicker than their competitors and later became the Uber known today.
How to define that minimum workable set of features for your MVP?
Now lets see how to define minimal workable set of features for your MVP.
First of all, define the problem your product is going to solve. Then identify the value it would bring to the customer. You may use the value proposition canvas for it. Next, define the list of features. Start with outlining the user journey. Use your value proposition canvas. Find several major use cases there and describe what steps users have to take in your product to solve their problem.
Think of all of the features users need to go through each step and write them down. And finally, prioritize features.
You can use one of the prioritization frameworks like prioritization metrics, Moscow approach or Kano model with a list of features in your hands start building an MVP.
But remember, the idea of an MVP is to bring only crucial set of features, something that brings your customers real value and allows you to learn and iterate to later come up with a better product. An MVP is just your first step in the whole product lifecycle, so keep iterating and evolving.