Why Minimum Viable Product (MVP)?

 What is an MVP?

An MVP is a product that has the minimum features required to validate your product idea.

Eric Ries (American entrepreneur and the author of 'Lean Startup'), defined MVP as that version of a new product that allows the team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.

Difference between an MVP and a prototype?

A prototype is built at the very early stages and helps you visualize your product. Before you get into the real software building, with a prototype you can manually simulate your product and its user journey or experience. Hence a prototype could be a depiction using basic front end or even built using a prototyping tool. 

Prototypes are what you use to present to potential investors to pitch in an idea and give them a feel of what it looks like. 

It is when you understand your product and idea, the MVP comes into play. To gain this initial understanding, the prototype serves its purpose. Now, an MVP is a prototype at its heart but it will be created once you have the necessary confidence and got proof of concept. An MVP is created for you to share this with your potential customers - to test the waters. 

In your career, you might stumble upon clients who say that they do not want half-baked products so they would like to have the full-blown functionality. What they need to understand is that MVP is not half baked. 

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For e.g.: 

If you were building - let's say Uber. Its core functionality is to hail a cab. 

Therefore, if you build an application that allows customers to register, use GPS to locate themselves, hail a cab. That could be your MVP. 

All the other features such as in-app messaging, driver registrations, card payments, decorated receipts, ratings, tips, favorite location tagging can be added in later - once you know your core value proposition (which is to hail a cab) is something that people use. In the meantime, communication can be done via phone calls and registrations for drivers could be taken in manually. 

So, what should and shouldn't be included in an MVP?

TIP 1 - Stay away from cool features. 

TIP 2 - Include the core features. 

This is basically the purpose of the application, the most obvious features that lets you get a clear cut go ahead on your product idea. The features you include should give you the confidence to proceed to the next phases of your development. 

TIP 3 - Don't spend time making it flawless. 

Don't spend a frivolous amount of time improving the efficiency or scalability a great deal. Build just enough into the product. 

TIP 4 - Know what determines your success and failure. 

Have a good understanding of how you are going to measure this. This was the whole point of the MVP. Have a plan to collect valuable feedback from the MVP users. 

TIP 5 - Don't spend time creating everything from scratch

For E.g: Designing the intricate details such as the icons, for your MVP will be a waste of time, energy, effort and money. Instead, use available tools. Most of them can be found for free. 

Now, to understand the concept of MVP better, I have created a simple infographic (see below). 

Benefits of going for an MVP?

Brings focus on the core value proposition of the product

Sometimes passion becomes a personal deciding factor. 

We might end up developing a full-blown product that the target market we had in mind won't really use. 

Building an MVP allows you to build just enough features to test if this is what your target audience is really looking for. If it solves their problem. 

Hence, this allows you to gain early feedback and pivot accordingly. 

In other words, an MVP allows us to fail fast, learn fast, and adapt quickly. 

Quick time to market 

Since you are focused on a very limited amount of features and not on perfecting the product, the MVP can be delivered quickly. Perfecting a product takes time and the odds are someone else will have put the product to market before you by the time you think of releasing it. 

Allows you to spend money efficiently

Rather than investing a whole fortune in a full-blown product, MVPs cost you less due to the minimal effort and time it takes to build. Also, development is iterative and you can choose to pay as you go. Also, in case your idea turns out to be a failure, you have not spent a lot but you have learnt a lot. 

Build customer relationships

As you release your MVP to customers, keep close contact with them, and request for feedback and suggestions. While this allows you to find critical weaknesses in your product faster this enables you to build and maintain good relationships with potential customers. 

Who are MVPs for?

MVPs are for anyone, but it's almost a must for a startup. This is because a startup or a novel idea does not have an audience. This means, there is a lot of feedback and lots of experimenting to be done. 

Please leave in your comments and questions below. I'd love to hear your thoughts.