A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) allows businesses to create a workable version of their product in the shortest possible timeframe. But what is a Minimum Viable Product and why do they matter?
Read on for our guide to Minimum Viable Products to learn how you can use an MVP strategy to optimise costs, reduce budget and speed up processes.
A Minimum Viable Product contains only the essential features of your product. The idea behind it is to launch the foundations of a product, with enough features to entice early adopters to help you test and validate your ideas before further investments or development cycles.
Starting with an MVP allows you to nurture your understanding of customers’ needs and develop your product through constant iterations. It provides a fast and cost-effective way to test out your product idea and get valuable feedback from customers before spending time and investment developing a final product.
One of the biggest advantages of a Minimum Viable Product is speed. Instead of spending months (or years) building a polished product, you ship a lean version fast. This gets your idea into the hands of users sooner, giving you a chance to start learning and adapting quickly.
Building a full-featured product is expensive – and risky if you’re unsure of market demand. An MVP minimises that risk by cutting down the initial development scope. It allows you to save money on developing unnecessary features and further investment in features users aren’t interested in while allocating resources more efficiently.
When launching a new product, two of the biggest risks are blowing your budget or missing the deadline. A Minimum Viable Product is designed to reduce both of these risks by focusing on what matters most – the user experience. A MVP strips the product down to its core features for better prioritisation. Fewer features mean fewer development hours and it’s easier to estimate and track costs avoiding scope creep.
Minimum Viable Products remove guesswork in decision making by putting your product in front of real people. This allows you to iterate based on data, rather than feeling. By testing with real users, you can see what works, what doesn’t, and ultimately, build a product people want. Iteration is key in agile development and MVPs are built for learning. Once you launch, you can test, tweak and evolve your product based on user behavior and feedback. This Agile approach leads to smarter decisions and a stronger product over time.
Before you build a product, you need to know there is a genuine demand for it – and building your brand ahead of launch is imperative. Some ways to build hype for your MVP include an SEO campaign and landing page, collecting email addresses ahead of launch, social media marketing and a PR campaign. The more engagement your platform has, the more feedback you’ll collect and the easier it’ll be to scale your product.
In Agile development, prioritisation is key. We do this by using a tool called MoSCoW to decide which features to include in a product or sprint. MoSCow outlines the features that a product must have, should have, could have and won’t have.
Before you launch a Minimum Viable Product, it’s important to set expectations and goals to help you understand what a successful product looks like to you. Your objectives should align with commercial targets and must align with what you are trying to achieve. For instance, you might decide that you’ll only move forward with the development of your full app once you’ve hit 1,000 downloads on the App Store, or users have engaged with your app for a month. Alternatively, success to you might look like collecting 1,000 pieces of feedback, receiving praise on social media or logging 1,000 hours of in-app time from users. Success looks different for every project.
A Minimum Viable Product allows you to test your vision in the real world, learn from your users and iterate toward success, reducing time and money. Speak to one of the team to start planning your digital product and discover how an MVP strategy can benefit you.
