Build a Minimum Viable Product

A Minimum Viable Product is the smallest thing you can build that delivers customer value

Nov 07, 2021

Hey PMs, Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Free Agency.

You know how to manage products, but what about managing your own job search? Free Agency puts your career on autopilot, helping you find and win a top-of-market role in tech. The best product roles aren't easy to find. You need an "in" to "win," and a dedicated Talent Agent can be that solution. Last quarter, we helped product leaders and emerging PMs join buzzworthy companies, from Apple to Zoom and Airtable to Zapier. You deserve more than what you make. Ready to earn it?

What is an MVP

The most straightforward definition is: a minimum viable product (MVP) is the simplest core feature set of any product that allows the product to be used and nothing more.

Another popular definition is: MVP is the smallest thing that you can build that delivers the core value for early adopters.

Where does the MVP approach come from?

The approach is best known from the Lean Startup Method by Eric Ries. He defined the MVP as that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort. You validate your learning by finding out if your customers are willing to purchase your product.

In the core of the Lean Startup Method is the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop. Through this, companies can experiment, learn and react rapidly to the market need.

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!

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.

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.

Share Product Mindset's Newsletter

Got anything interesting to add? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

Product Mindset's Newsletter