5 steps to successful MVP with examples
Simplified practical insights to powerful MVPs for aspiring Product Managers
Minimal Viable Product (MVP) is all about having a working idea, which can be applied and validated for product-market fit. The faster, easier, and cheaper you can do it effectively the better your MVP. Exploring the possibility of different strategies and types of MVP are other interesting learnings, saving them now for an upcoming post. The fast and deep learning from an efficient MVP leads to data-driven decisions to improvise it further into a more mature product.
MVP is like a series of control eperiments that guides the progress of Product in a scientific method by keeping Product Mangers upraised about the progress and pottential of product in making.
A successful MVP (validating or disapproving the hypothesis and leading to the formation of a new hypothesis) is a strong move towards a thriving product and a lauded Product Manager. Nevertheless, a displeased MVP experiment is likewise valuable to understanding strategy shortfalls and pivotal opportunities.
A systematic approach with an optimal mix of science and art can be used to design a scientific hypothesis-based MVP experiment. At a high level, there are 5 key steps to the MVP (cyclic process) experiment.
1. Analyze
Understanding prospective consumers and their needs is essential. It is also indispensable to understand customer habits, industry trends, and available alternatives in the market. Through target market research and analysis, one can realize: What is needed? Why is it needed? How is the need being addressed without your product? For whom is it needed? When will the product be used? What would be useful for your users and customers? What would not be valued by the target audience? and many more such insightful explorations with respect to your product and value offering.
For example, you could realize that your prospective food delivery product is most suited for young working bachelors during early morning hours to pre-book or instant order breakfast, as very few food delivery options are available at this time. The usability of this product would be less for other folks and also during evening hours, as there are multiple established operators to service at this time.
Once the understanding of 'What, Why, When, Who, How, etc.' is established, then is time to go to the next step!
2. Define
Now is the time to think about how are you going to address your customer needs and wishes. This is the tricky part where you (The Product Manager) distinguish between needs and wants. Some things asked by customers may not be that critical or valuable versus some other more impactful features. Here your judgment plays a vital role in not just defining what would be most valuable for your customers but also how are they going to use it. Additionally, any decision needs to take the product’s strategic vision into consideration.
For example, for a cab aggregator business (inspired by the UBER use case), you might decide to start with the functionality of instant cab booking and defer scheduling cab booking for now. You may also choose to have a simple UX and a prototype that will be launched to a beta group first before a broader rollout. You might want to add something that distinguishes your product from the competitors to help establish your unique value proposition.
All these decisions and considerations shape up your MVP and set the next steps of the journey. It defines: what your customers get and what they don't get now? how they are going to get what is most valuable to them? how the problem at hand is going to be solved? etc.
3. Implement
This is the most exciting time for the Product Development Team. You (The Product Manager) play the role of an orchestrator who works with a cross-functional team of front-end developers, UX designers, backend developers, quality assurance teams, release managers, legal support, IT security, product support groups, other service providers, marketing and sales partner, etc. to shape the vision into a working reality.
This is the part of a journey where you are putting your trust and vision into your wider team to create something really impactful and valuable for your customers.
Often product teams embrace Agile-based methodology for a transparent and more predictable implementation phase. Explore my earlier post on “Excelling Modern Digital Product Management with Business Agility”.
4. Validate
Now, your dream product is ready to test the waters of the real market. Depending on your chosen release strategy you might roll out the product to either just the beta users or to all the customers. In any case, this is the time to listen. Direct customer feedback and data-driven analysis should be used to complement each other to reach a robust validation outcome.
Listen to what your product users are telling about your product. Good, bad, ugly, whatever you get to hear back from your customer, is immensely valuable.
If they say good about some features try to understand what they like about it? what is making it good? If they don't like something, be open to accepting it and investigate what they do not like about it? what is making it worse? Is it the UI, or the UX, or the bad choice of feature? Is it a buggy application? etc.
This provides a lot of insights to be used for future experiments. Some of the tools and approaches used for this phase are A/B testing, multi-variant testing, user feedback analysis, social media sentiment analysis, support request analysis, focus groups with beta users and customers, sales and marketing team inputs, etc. This is the most crucial part of your feedback loop. You will be receiving feedback and inputs from heterogeneous sources at variable rates, make the most of it in the next step. You could be using a lot of data analytics and insight-generation tools for this purpose.
5. Improvise
This is the time to close the feedback loop. You had some idea, you worked on it, you gave it to your customers to use, and your customers and users will speak “What they think about it”. Now, use this piece of experience and information to enrich the product.
Product Management is a highly iterative process and the feedback loop must be mindfully leveraged in order to create a great product.
You can improvise by doing any or all of the actions like, creating a new hypothesis, changing the next release features, enhancing the overall user experience, exploring other market and customer segments, pivoting product roadmap, etc
So, with the conclusion of the improvising phase, a Product Manager again plans for the next cycle i.e. Understand → Define → Implement → Validate → Improvise.
Conclusion
These cycles could be of a varied length of a few days or a few weeks even a couple of months. Depending on the nature of your business, product customer base, pace of market dynamics, etc. you can determine a suitable cycle length for your product. However, generally, the shorter the cycle, the faster you can course-correct and improvise. Some product and business types (products with a long turnaround time) may not be suited for shorter iteration cycles.
That’s it for now. More in the next edition.
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