17/36 : 🚀 Minimum Viable Product Playbook
A Minimum Viable Product is the smallest thing you can build that delivers customer value
What is MVP
MVP stands for “Minimum viable product”. A minimum viable product has sufficient functionality that satisfies early adopters who provide feedback on its future development.
A minimum viable product relates to the Lean Startup methodology which provides a scientific approach to creating and managing start-up businesses and getting products that customers desire into their hands quicker and more efficiently than ever before.
Eric Ries, the pioneer of the Lean Startup movement, describes a minimum viable product as: “[the] version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort”.
By exposing the earliest form of a product idea to consumers you can maximise your learnings of the product and its potential without investing your maximum time and effort. As a result, minimum viable products are considered a risk reduction tool, that exist to help start-ups test the water without producing something that’s not economically viable.
While a minimum viable product is designed to take little time and effort to create it, it does not necessarily need to be something that’s rough around the edges. Ultimately its features should reflect the demands of the product and market. Think of it as a prototype – keep the feature set as simple as possible to test the water and collect the maximum amount of validated learning from consumers with the least effort and cost.
In fact, a minimum viable product is probably not best suited to those looking to produce something quickly and sell on for a profit. A minimum viable product works better for entrepreneurs thinking long term - happy to create a first iteration of a product in order to develop a better version further down the line - capable of competing with products built by companies better financed and already established within the marketplace.
Thinking back to the Lean Startup methodology, a minimum viable product is a key component of this model, encouraging entrepreneurs to build, measure and learn, working smarter not necessarily harder.
MVP is not rushing to do everything
When you create an MVP this means that you are more focused on the essential concepts initially instead of rushing to implement every single thing you or your managers have decided, which can affect the product negatively.
What are the benefits of a minimum viable product?
The main benefit of an MVP is that you can understand your customers’ needs and interests without fully developing a product. This enables you to build a product that the customers truly care about, and increase your chance for overall success. The sooner you get feedback on your idea the less is the chance to waste your money and time.
The core benefits of an MVP can be grouped into three categories:
Validations and value proposition focus
Validate product idea hypotheses with real-life data
Validate the business model
Test whether the product is needed without developing the full product
Accelerate your learning on what customers need and how to iterate to deliver that
Brings focus on the core value proposition, which you need to narrow down to be able to build an MVP
Early customer acquisition
Builds relationships with customers through feedbacks
Grow a pre-launch user base
Resource optimization
Enter the market faster, which can help gain a competitive advantage
Reduce time-to-market for new feature releases
Minimize wasted development hours by focusing on the most important core features
Reduces remakes of the product features
Saves money, since if your idea is proven to be a failure at least you haven’t spent a lot of money!
An MVP should meet the following criteria
Minimal & Viable - Reduce the MVP to its essential useful functions and features.
Superior - Offer a significant advantage over the competition.
Focused - With the MVP you address a selected target group that is open to the new product.
Survivable - Your MVP should deliver added value (Ask yourself: Are your customers ready for use or even payment?)
Promising - Your MVP should have a high potential so that your early adopters will continue to use it in the future.
Expandable - Keep the scope to a level that allows for incremental development of the (minimal) product.
How to build an Minimum Viable Product
The process consists of the following steps:
Step 1: Validate your idea
Step 2: Create a User Flow
Step 3: Create user stories with story mapping
Step 4: Make a list of features and prioritize them
Step 5: Build, Test, Implement
Step 1: Validate your idea
Often, ideas that seem brilliant at first do not work out when implemented on the market.
Validating your idea with real users is crucial to ensure that there is a target market for the eventual product that the MVP will turn into.
Preserve, pivot or iterate
Sometimes, feedback will confirm your assumptions and indicate that you’re on the right track. Sometimes, it will tell you you’ve got it wrong, and you’re heading in the wrong direction.
These insights can be hurtful, but they’re crucial to build a product that people need. After all, you’re not building the product just to build something. You want to create software that people will fall over themselves to use. Without testing, you don’t know what that product looks like.
Step 2: Create a User Flow
After you’ve got a positive response to your idea, you should think through the main user flows. The user flow focuses on the process of using the product.
Look at the app from the users’ perspective.
Start from opening the app to the final process, such as making a purchase or delivery. What steps should the user go through? What actions do they have to take to get what they want?
User flows will help you define the process stages, which will help in defining the core features, your product needs.
How to create user flow?
There are no strict steps for creating user flows, but generally, you should go through these steps:
Identify and understand your user: Understand the user’s needs and motivations so you can make informed choices on how to get users into a flow-like state when using your product.
Create a flow outline: Write down a basic flow like a mind map or chart about the three main stages: an entry point, steps to completion, and the final interaction.
Define the elements of your user flow: organize the pages, screens and actions of the application into the user flow
Refine your outline: revisit the outline, make steps clear and see if they are logical.
Step 3: Create user stories with story mapping
From the user flows you want to create user stories. User stories are short, simple feature descriptions told from the perspective of your users and customers.
By visually mapping your user stories out, you break the user flow down into parts, making sure nothing gets missed and they get a fluid experience. Story mapping helps you to prioritize your feature backlog during product planning.
How to do story mapping
Frame the journey
Build your story backbone
Identify and group activities
Break large tasks into subtasks
Fill in the blanks
Prioritize tasks and subtasks
“Slice” groups of tasks into iterations
Step 4: Make a list of features and prioritize them
Once you have the process flow and user story designed, you already know all the steps that the app should have. All the features that should be added in each stage. Here is where the work gets tricky.
It is so easy to get lost into building the perfect user interface, that you may lose track of features that are more functional and urgent and don’t just make the app look good. This is the point you start prioritizing the features.
Step 5: Build, Test, Implement
With your MVP’s features defined, you can start developing. But crucially, this development isn’t a one and done deal. It’s the start of a feedback loop, designed to help you to continually improve your product.
Build, measure, learn. Once you’ve built the product test, collect feedback, then implement your learning into your work. Then test again.
Build up a user base Acquire users, so you have a lot of data to analyze. Release a beta version for your app and let the technology enthusiasts and early adopters try your product. It is crucial to have enough feedback on your prototype, both good and bad to fine-tune what users like and eliminate or improve the features causing trouble.
Collect usage data The point of an MVP is to be viable and generate revenue at some point in the future. With analytics tools like Mixpanel, Intercom or Amplitude you can collect usage data, and start tracking all the important metrics. Start calculating commerce metrics to understand what people are willing to pay for your product, whether the set price is enough to generate a profit.
Ask for user feedback Reach out to the users and ask them about their experience with the product. Make it easy for them to contact you. Collect all the insight about missing functionalities, bugs and unneeded features.
Refine your product User data you collect can signal opportunities to make new improvements. You can always invent different ways of integrating this feedback in the next stages of release. Keep building repeatedly, until you reach a fully-finished product that customers would be happy to pay for.
What are MVP Examples Used For?
These days, the market situation is volatile and trends come and go quickly. The MVP tests your product with core functionality and with fewer risks in terms of time and budget resources.
Hence, the benefits of using the minimum viable product examples are as follows:
Ability to test a product hypothesis with minimal resources
Avoidance of the bigger failures and fund expense
Checking real-life market tendencies
Cooperation and hand-in-hand work with potential users in crafting the final product necessary
Shortest time between product launch on the market and early adopters
Gaining and expanding the user base
Possibility to attract investors early
Ability to apply for crowdfunding
Continuous product development team learning and education
Reduction of potentially wasted engineering hours
Examples of minimum viable products in action
You may be surprised to learn how many of the world’s most successful brands started as minimum viable products. Here are a few of our favorite stories:
1. Twitter
With 500 million Tweets sent each day, it’s hard to believe that Twitter started as an internal service for podcast platform Odeo.
Twitter’s original ‘hook’ was that it allowed teams of people to share updates via SMS — but this quickly spiraled out of control, with employees spending hundreds of dollars on cellphone bills!
Seeing this unexpected uptake, the Twitter team took their product public (and swapped costly SMS messaging for Tweets!)
2. Uber
The Uber story started with a problem — ordering a taxi in San Francisco was hard. In 2009 Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp decided to reinvent the taxi market and connect passengers with taxi drivers in one app.
They considered 2 facts:
people want to get from A to B quickly and predictably;
taxi drivers need clients and it’s hard to look for them on the street.
In the minimum viable product, there were only 3 limousines together with the killer feature: one-click order with the possibility to track the driver’s location. It turned out to be just enough to raise the first round of funding and develop the idea into what we can now download on App Store and Google Play.
3. Virgin Airlines
Virgin Airlines is one of the largest British airlines operating internationally that was established, and is owned, by Richard Branson. What was the minimum viable product for Virgin Airlines? It was just one route and one plane flying between Gatwick and Newark.
4. Yahoo!
What was the MVP product for Yahoo? Yahoo was represented as an MVP website, a single-page website that contained a list of links to other sites. This was a sufficient amount of functionality to satisfy the users and retain early adopters of the system. Today, the system is the second most popular search engine in the world.
5. Airbnb
Airbnb was started as a concierge MVP. Back in 2017, there was a great design conference in San Francisco. The Airbnb team decided to offer their cheap accommodations during this event and posted the information on a simple website.
Within a short period of time, 3 guests were interested in paying for this minimum viable service. This supported the market insight that potential customers would be willing to pay to stay at someone else’s home rather than in a hotel.
6. Facebook
In late 2004, Facebook was the definition of MVP on social media. Users had a simple profile and a great opportunity to connect with their group mates. This one feature was enough to provide an awesome boost and turn a small project into one of the largest public tech companies in history.
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