An MVP, or Minimally Viable Product, is a common process in the modern software world. It got famous as part of the Lean Startup model, and has grown in popularity. Let’s look at some reasons why.
When looking at the design and model of your project, you may think you have a winner. But do you? Many times a product has had thousands, if not millions, of dollars and hours worked on it, only to flop. We see this in physical products (Edsel), Entertainment (Birds of Prey movie), and software too (Duke Nukem 3D).
However, with software, we can work on giving a starting point and seeing how good it really is. A live test if you would. This where where the idea of an MVP comes from.
To build an MVP, you follow these steps:
- Determine what problem you are solving and for who. By doing this, figure out your necessary features, vs those that are nice. You’re going to focus on your necessary features only.
- Analyze your competitors. Are you addressing a short coming? Solving a new problem? Will this be enough to get people to switch?
- List necessary features and prioritize them. This is the best known step. What is really necessary. Cut the rest. Focus on what’s most important!
- Build, Test, Learn, Repeat. Focus groups, stakeholders, etc are all important, but sometimes come from a limited perspective. People actually using your responses will give you more info than you can expect. A key component is to learn from your product usage and make changes based upon what you see.
Building an MVP should ideally only take 1 to 2 months, compared to 6+ months for a regular product launch. This means it gets in the hands of your users faster, and start up costs are not as much.
Building an MVP is common in Agile environments because it allows you to work on the development cycle. Within 1 to 3 cycles a product is ready for launch and then you can start collecting feedback on your product. Each new cycle allows you to fix things about the initial product which don’t work correctly, add features, etc.
Defining your MVP was originally found on Access 2 Learn
