What is a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)? Learn

A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a product with sufficient features to attract early users and validate the idea of the product at an early stage in the product development cycle. MVP plays a critical role in Agile development because the Agile methodology is built on validating and iterating products according to the user input. But What is a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)? It is a version of your product that is functional but not fully completed, enabling individuals to test it and provide feedback. Read this blog to learn more about Minimum Viable Product.   

Table of Contents 

1) Defining Minimum Viable product (MVP) 

2) Purpose of Minimum Viable Product 

3) How to define a Minimum Viable Product? 

4) Steps to build Minimum Viable Product 

5) Benefits of Minimum Viable Products 

6) Types of Minimum Viable Product  

7) Mistakes to avoid while building an MVP 

8) Conclusion  

Defining Minimum Viable Product (MVP) 

A Minimum Viable Product  is one of the basic features that can still be known as a product. In other words, it’s an early stage or version of a product that contains only features and is required to provide its core value. With the help of MVP, organisations can enjoy a lot of benefits. A Minimum Viable Product helps the organisation validate its predictions regarding the product and its users. It allows organisations to collect feedback from early adopters and check if the product is matching with their requirements. Feedback helps in knowing what type of improvements and enhancements you need to make in the initial version of the product.   

A Minimum Viable Product is not a shortcut or the fastest way to create a product to fulfil the short-term goal. The main motive of MVP is addressing what functionality and features your products require to engage the target audience. An MPV can also be used in testing the monetisation approaches and business model.
 

Purpose of Minimum Viable Product 

The concept of Minimum Viable Product was introduced by Eric Ries as a concept of his Lean Startup methodology. It describes the purpose of an MVP as an early version or stage of a product that enables an organisation to collect the validated learning about the customer with the least effort in a maximum amount. The objective of an organisation to release MVP is to launch the product in the market as soon as possible, test a product idea with real users before investing a huge amount, and understand what can resonate with the organisation’s target market.   

How to define a Minimum Viable Product? 

It is very important to know when the MVP is completely ready to release to the market. Here are the following strategies to follow.  

Ensure that your planned MVP matches with organisation objective  

Before considering the features to build, the very first step is to build your MVP. It ensures that the product will align with the organisation’s strategic objectives. Additionally, you must know what purpose this MVP will provide. Let's take an example- will it keep the new target audience engaged in a new market adjacent to the existing product? If this is one of your organisation's goals, then this MVP approach might be viable.  

Start to identify certain issues to improve your persona  

As in the first step, you have ensured your product matches the organisation's objective; you can begin to think of specific solutions that you can provide to the target audience through your product. You might present these solutions in users' epics, stories or features. But remember one thing that does not represent the overall vision of the product, only the subgroup of that vision. You have to be strategic while deciding which limited feature or functionality to incorporate in your MVP. You can make these decisions based on various factors such as user research, competitive analysis, how fast you can iterate on certain functionalities when you get user feedback and relative costs for the implementation of several users' epics and stories.   

Transform your MVP functionality into a plan 

Now that you’ve considered the strategic components above and decided on the limited functionality you want for your MVP, it’s time to summarise this into an action plan for expansion. It’s very important to remember that the V in MVP—means the product must be viable. That means it must enable your consumers to complete tasks or projects and deliver a high-quality user experience. An MVP can't be a user interface with multiple half-built features and tools. It is a working product that your organisation should be able to sell. 

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Steps to build a Minimum Viable Product

There are various key steps to building a successful Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that assist in creating a functional version of the product while reducing the resources and time investment. Here are the following steps that you need to follow to build an MVP.    

1) Address the primary problem: In the first step, you need to address the primary issues of the product and aim to solve them. It may be as easy as questioning why the product is required. Your solutions should be the foundation to determine the features and functionality of the product to focus on.   

2) Define the target audience: It is essential to address your target audience and analyse their pain point, preferences and behaviours. In this step, you need to create a comprehensive user persona explaining who will purchase your product without giving it a second thought. Getting familiar with your target audience's lifestyles helps in figuring out whether your product meets their expectations or not.   

3) Assess the competition: Examine competitive products and those contiguous to your industry. Understanding what they got right and what they require to improve can assist you in defining the functionality of your MVP. Check out their customer reviews, market share and articles from the blogger and press. Understanding the competition’s strengths and weaknesses can help you find what your product requires to prevail against them. 

4) Build an initial design: This step generally involves technical architects, business analysts, and UX/UI designers. Firstly, business analysts explain in detail what the MVP should look like. The architects take that narrative and determine the tech stack required; this may need them to make a proof of concept. Then, the designers create functioning prototypes, a product style guide, and a visual design for the MVP. 

5) Build an MVP: Now that your team has gained so much knowledge from the previous steps, your development team is all set to build and test Minimum Viable Product. Based on its complexity, your MVP can take a few days to various months to develop and test. 

6) Launch and collect feedback: In this step, you need to gather feedback. So, try to make it as simple as possible for your target audience to share their views, thoughts and suggestions. Based on the type of product and audience, you can do interviews, surveys and other efforts like this to collect overall user feedback. 

7) Examine and iterate: Remember that the purpose of an MVP is to test predictions, validate ideas, and collect user feedback. Thus, each step should be accomplished to understand real-world usage and make educated decisions for the product’s future direction. As you explore the feedback, don’t just see what they don't like about the MVP but also see what they like and where they see gaps in implementation and functionality. Utilise this information to enhance the next version of the product. 

Benefits of Minimum Viable Product 

There are various benefits of a Minimum Viable Product. Let's have a look at a few of them. 

1) Focus on key functionalities: The MVP approach enables you to find transparency and focus on the key functionality of the product. It lets you test your business idea with the lowest costs and time. Most product owners are inclined to add repetitious functionality before the product is even released in the market. Including a huge amount of functionality makes it easy to lose concentration on the specific problem you seek to solve. 

2) Save time and money: Building a complete product needs time and money. Sometimes, it even takes more than a year and costs hundreds of thousands. Not everyone can afford a lot of resources to spare. It is also not smart because your time and effort can be wasted if the idea is unsuccessful. In comparison, you can launch an MVP very quickly. It takes only a few weeks and needs a small amount of budget to develop the product. In this way, you can test your idea without investing too much time and money.  

3) Better understanding of user’s requirements: The gathered data and thorough target audience research cannot be overvalued. Feedback from early adopters is much more useful than the best predictions of business analytics and professional advisers. The faster a client can test the product, the more effective expansion you get. 

4) Clear user interface: The MVP approach saves your initial product from getting jumbled with undesirable features. Consequently, the product is quickly adopted and simple to use. That's also an excellent opportunity to try how additional features work. You can examine each one individually without needing to monitor everything. 

5) Iterative improvement: With the help of MVP, you can iterate and evolve your product based on user feedback and data. This iterative approach ensures that you are building something that actually meets user needs and is more likely to succeed in the market.  

6) Reduced waste: developing a full-fledged product without validating it with real users can lead to significant waste of resources if the product does not match the expectations of the users. An MVP helps you avoid building unnecessary features and functionalities.  

7) Risk mitigation: By testing your idea with an MVP, you can assess market demand and viability early in the development process. This eradicates the risk of investing heavily in a product that is going to be successful in the market.  

Types of Minimum Viable Product
 

There are various types of Minimum Viable Products. Which type of MVP you can use depends on the product's nature, your objective, available resources and the level of authentication you need. 

1) Single-Feature MVP: This type of MVP focuses on developing and launching the product with a single-core feature and functionality. It enables you to test the viability of a product idea by delivering the essential components. 

2) Concierge MVP: In this type of MVP, the product’s core functionality is manually performed by a human behind the scenes. It provides a personalised experience to the users while testing the concept.  

3) Wizard of Oz MVP:  This MVP is just similar to the single concierge MVP. It gives you the appearance of a completely automated product, but certain functions are manually executed by the team.  

4) Landing Page MVP: In this type of MVP, you build a landing page or a website that describes the product's value rather than building the whole product. Users can sign up and express interest, and this ultimately helps in collecting user data. 

5) Explainer Video MVP: This type of MVP is a short video that showcases the product's value and, prepositions and functionality without actually building the product. It can be used to gather feedback and generate interest.    

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Mistakes to avoid while building an MVP 

Here are the following mistakes that you can avoid while building a Minimum Viable Product.   

1) Overcomplicating the product: One of the primary purposes of an MVP is to simplify the product to its core features and functionalities. Avoid adding too many features or trying to make the MVP a fully featured product. Overcomplication can lead to longer development times, increased costs, and a loss of focus on the essential elements.  

2) Neglecting user feedback: An MVP acts as a tool to gather user feedback and learn from it. Neglecting to actively seek and listen to user feedback is a significant mistake. It can result in building a product that does not address user’s needs effectively.   

3) Skipping validation of assumptions: The MVP approach helps validate or invalidate assumptions about your product concept, target audience, and market demand. Missing this step of validating these assumptions can lead to building a product based on incorrect or unverified assumptions. Always prioritise validation through user testing, surveys, or market research.  

4) Rushing the development process: While speed is one of the most useful advantages of MVP, rushing through the development procedure can affect the quality and usability. So it is very important to keep the quality and speed maintained. Poorly building an MVP can leave a negative impression on early users.   

Conclusion 

We hope that now you have a better understanding of Minimum Viable Product. This blog has all the details about MVP, such as What is a Minimum Viable Product, its types, benefits, its steps and mistakes while building MVP.   

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