The answer to the question begins with the definition of MVP. A minimum viable product (MVP) is a concept from Lean Start-up that stresses the impact of learning in new product development. Eric Ries defined an 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. This validated learning comes in the form of whether your customers will purchase your product. A key premise behind the idea of MVP is that you produce an actual product (which may be no more than a landing page, or a service with an appearance of automation, but which is fully manual behind the scenes) that you can offer to customers and observe their actual behaviour with the product or service. Seeing what people actually do with respect to a product is much more reliable than asking people what they would do.
The primary benefit of an MVP is you can gain understanding about your customers’ interest in your product without fully developing the product. The sooner you can find out whether your product will appeal to customers, the less effort and expense you spend on a product that will not succeed in the market.
Teams use the term MVP, but do not fully understand its intended use or meaning. Often this lack of understanding manifests in believing that an MVP is the smallest amount of functionality they can deliver, without the additional criteria of being sufficient to learn about the business viability of the product.
Teams may also confuse an MVP–which has a focus on learning–for a Minimum Marketable Feature (MMF) or Minimum Marketable Product (MMP)–which has a focus on earning. There’s not too much harm in this unless the team becomes too focused on delivering something without considering whether it is the right something that satisfies customer’s needs.
Teams stress the minimum part of MVP to the exclusion of the viable part. The product delivered is not sufficient quality to provide an accurate assessment of whether customers will use the product.
Teams deliver what they consider an MVP, and then do not do any further changes to that product, regardless of feedback they receive about it.
Proper use of an MVP means that a team may dramatically change a product that they deliver to their customers or abandon the product together based on feedback they receive from their customers. The minimum aspect of MVP encourages teams to do the least amount of work possible to useful feedback which helps them avoid working on a product that no one wants.
Now we will look at the step-by-step process of presenting your MVP to the potential customers:
1. Identify and Understand the Business Needs
At the very beginning, you should have identified a need as to why the product should exist. This could be an organizational need, or a customer need that addresses a current gap.
a) Determine the long-term goal and write it down. Answer this simple question: Why are we doing this project? A coffee shop chain, for example, may have the long-term goal of reducing time-to-checkout by 30%.
b) Identify success criteria. Next, identify the criteria that will determine whether or not the product will be successful. This will likely — and probably should — consist of more than one metric. Our coffee chain, for example, might define success by reaching that 30% time-to-checkout reduction, having 100,000 active monthly users, and reaching $1 million in monthly transactions via their app.
2. Find the Opportunities
In the first stage of planning your minimum viable product, you should have already identified market gaps or identified a problem that needs to be solved, whether for your company or for consumers. The next stage of MVP development consists of finding the opportunities to solve these problems and add value via your app.
a) Map out the user journey(s): The user journey is most easily divided into three parts: the user, user actions, and story endings.
i. Identify the user(s): These are the people who will be using your product. It’s possible that you will have more than one category of user. For example, if you have a service appointment booking app, you may have both the appointment scheduler (customer), and the service technician.
ii. Identify the story endings. For each user, there will be a story ending, which is the end goal of the user.
iii. Identify the jobs (actions). The jobs are the actions that the user or users need to take to reach the story ending and achieve the goal.
b) Create a Pain and Gain map for each action: The pain and gain map allow you to identify all user pain points and the gains the user achieves when each is addressed. This exercise lets you determine where you have the greatest potential to add value. You are then able to focus your minimum viable product on these areas while adding the less impactful ones to the product roadmap for future releases.
i) Write down the actions the user needs to complete. List the actions that you identified when mapping out the user journeys.
ii) Write down the pain points for each action. The pain points are brief summaries of the problems or inconveniences that users have when trying to complete that action.
iii) Write down the gain for each action. The gain is what value is achieved when that pain is addressed.
c) Summarize the pains and gains into opportunity statements: There are several ways to summarize pains and gains. One is to use opportunity statements that follow a “How Might We” format. For example, “How might we make it easier for users to book appointments?” This helps you translate the pains and gains you identified in the previous step into feature sentences.
3. Decide What Features to Build
In this stage, you will be able to discern what features to include in your minimum viable product, as well as the features to include on the product roadmap that are a lower priority.
a) Use opportunity statements to finalize your features. Using your opportunity statements from the previous step, finalize what features you want to build out. At this stage in the MVP development process, you will want to create feature sentences. For our Pet Adopters that are applying to adopt animals, for example, the opportunity statement “How might we expedite the application process?” could become “Reduce application processing time by 10%.”
b) Provide a breakdown of the features to include in the product roadmap. List the user and the specific opportunity statements and provide a breakdown of the features to include in the product roadmap.
c) Use a prioritization matrix (or similar method) to prioritize features. This step helps you identify where you can make the most impact on your product in relation to the urgency of the feature. Using a prioritization matrix, you can make the final decision on what absolutely needs to be included in your minimum viable product, and what features can be included in later releases. Below is our recommended format for your MVP prioritization matrix.
At this point, you should have a strong foundation to get started with developing your minimum viable product. You have identified and understand your business or customer needs; you have found the opportunities to address the pain points, and you have decided what features to build and their priority. Now, you can focus on getting your MVP to market.
Besides if you do have any questions give me a call: https://clarity.fm/joy-brotonath