Why is MVP essential to the success of your project?
Posted on Mar 28, 2022 at 08:03 PM
If you're working in product development, project management, or launching a start-up, you may have heard the term Minimum Viable Product or MVP.
MVP has become an essential part of product creation in recent years, particularly as rapid development among software teams and institutions has become more popular and Lean-based to reduce waste of resources, tools, time and funds.
The concept of MVP is relatively straightforward but is often misunderstood in practice.
This article explains the term for the Minimum Viable Product and how to set a minimum product so that you can integrate it into your set of project mechanisms and tools and use it successfully in your next project.
What is the concept of MVP or the Minimum Viable Product?
The term Minimum Viable Product, abbreviated MVP, is a concept used in Agile project management or so-called Lean Start-up. It expresses the first saleable version of your minimally designed product as the first launch station for marketing for the target market.
MVP can be a car, website, TV, laptop, etc., and contains enough features to satisfy first users and their needs. The MVP developer checks its assumptions: usability and demand, and accordingly, the end product are developed.
Imagine you need a new product. The goal of your company is to build a software product. However, you don't know what features the product should have or what the product should look like. You have an idea, but that's it. To facilitate the idea, we give the following example:
To find out what features and designs are most needed by your customers, you need to get valuable feedback from them as soon as possible. That's why you plan to release a minimum viable product (MVP).
At first, it can be just a landing page with a description of your product and its most important benefits. Then, you can add a sign-up form so that the interested visitors can leave their email addresses and sign up for a newsletter to receive news about your product. After that, you can develop a demo version of your software product.
Finally, when you get enough feedback from your users, you can create and release the full version of your software product.
According to the CB InSight report, the primary reason for the failure of start-ups was the assumption by their producers that there was no need to know the view of the target market.
Before launching new products, this led to almost half of these companies spending months or even several years building a product before finding out that they were initially wrong with their assumptions.
What are the characteristics of the minimum viable product MVP?
If you're interested in the world of entrepreneurship, or you intend to start a new start-up. After you build a visualisation of your product's idea or business model, the most important mechanism is to build an initial product or service. Still, initially, you have to recognise MVP features.
The following are the essential properties of MVP or the minimum viable product:
1- MVP contains the essence of the idea of a product or service:
A minimum viable product or MVP is a miniature product or service that carries in the first model a number of the most fundamental features of the idea of your product.
If building the smallest MVP for your pilot project doesn't reflect the essence of the value of the product or service you want to offer, you won't receive reliable feedback from customers, and you won't be able to develop your product based on it.
2- MVP construction cost is low:
Ideally, the Minimum viable product should be built at a minimum, at a simple cost, and designed with minimal effort to be tested and later modified until the entrepreneur reaches the final product.
Low cost is essential for start-ups that usually have a small budget. So the business must build the Minimum viable product MVP, release it quickly, and receive valuable feedback from customers without spending much time or money building it.
3- The Minimum viable product has a distinct value:
The MVP product or the Minimum viable product must provide the first users with an idea of the final product and the value that it will provide them. So when developing a product or service, consider the target value of the product or service and the potential problems it can address.
4- Your MVP product is replicable:
The MVP of your pilot project should be a great launch station for future development, allowing you to start building basic features and replicating them.
5- Benefits of Building Smaller Value Product:
The entrepreneur needs to know what benefits he will gain from building the Minimum viable product MVP before he starts developing the action plan, so the main benefits are as follows:
6- Building confidence in your product presentation:
Nowadays, many start-ups rely on investors to launch a new product or service.
Relying on a product-building approach or a mini-service of your product is very likely to attract the attention of potential investors.
Not only does the Minimum viable product prove the utility and benefits of the product, but it also offers a concrete solution to stakeholders who are aware of the return on their investments and facilitates the process of obtaining funding.
7- Testing business ideas and product concepts:
The most important benefit of building the Minimum viable product MVP of your idea is to allow companies to test their leading ideas and product concepts early in the project's life. This is done through tests on an experimental product with unique features or a mini service rather than a fully finished product.
Using a Minimum viable product methodology means-testing marketing and sales channels and obtaining early customer reviews.
Using a Minimum viable product construction methodology, the business leader can verify whether the concept of their product matches the clients, thus providing an opportunity to change the direction of the product according to the results of the experiments.
8- Support market demands:
The MVP product or the Minimum viable product allows the entrepreneur to test the requirements of people in the market and the extent to which customers are interested in the project. Thus, potential customers will order or use this product or service in the future.
Based on experience and client feedback after the MVP Experiment, companies are reworking the proposed product model, including more market differentiation.
Examples of projects based on the Minimum viable product MVP strategy
Facebook:
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of social media site Facebook, launched the site, was a primary MVP product or service, which was a networking site with only friends and contained a few features. The development phase of the version was the Minimum viable product based primarily on personal files, and the MVP was available only to Harvard students.
When the Minimum viable product proved popular enough to merit further expansion, it was gradually developed by adding a more extensive feature series until the site reached its current design.
Amazon:
Did you know that Amazon, the third-largest retailer globally, was a minimum viable product at the beginning, too?
Jeff Bezos created Amazon as an online bookstore.
That's when Amazon founder Jeff Bezos found a report stating that annual e-commerce growth will grow soon. As soon as Bezos read this report, he built the Minimum viable product.
In the construction phase of MVP, the Minimum viable product, Bezos created a list of the top 20 products with features that can market online. He then reduced the list to five products and eventually selected the books as the Minimum viable product.
When the MVP Minimum viable product proved successful, Bezos expanded and gradually added several products until the store reached its current position, including many different products.
Dropbox:
Dropbox started as a Minimum viable product, but you'd have the idea that this more MVP is a little weird.
At the Minimum viable product stage, Houston and his team created a 3-minute video that illustrated Dropbox's basic features and was published to measure viewers' feedback.
And here was the shock that this idea of MVP was trendy in the audience without a natural product. Any experience of watching a video of the product is enough to sell the idea!
What are the risks involved in developing the MVP?
The following are some of the flaws of MVPs that product producers and developers have to take into account when following the method of the Minimum viable product:
1- Loss of focus:
The method of working on the MVP product depends on the systematic development of a product or service test, which requires considerable focus and commitment, and the working mechanism is highly tactical and oriented towards developing your end product.
This business system is easy to lose focus while developing your MVP product, and it may end up underperforming the team and spending more time than you originally planned.
2- Be aware of competition:
Consider that others may have the same idea of producing your product, and competitors may be able to catch up faster than you expect.
Competitors may know your product's flaws by checking your MVP, improving it and creating a market-friendly product that might be better than yours and make you lose market share.
In addition to the above, the Minimum viable product method requires much-advanced work to obtain reliable client observations. Great development efforts may be required to deliver different product versions based on client feedback.
In addition, the entrepreneur has to attend Project management training courses in Paris, where it simplifies mechanisms for building the Minimum viable product through which to acquire the skills of managing all types of projects, both traditional and agile.
When can we use the MVP product?
The methodology of the Minimum viable product MVP you can use in all industries, but it can be easier to apply the concept of MVP to digital products and companies that use Kanban Agile Methodology.
Yet, in the world of entrepreneurship, you'd be surprised by the kinds of experiments of the Minimum viable product, significantly different values, which might be applied to us as users without feeling.
Suppose there are countless different methods of experimentation. In that case, the product manager decides why and how to experiment with MVP based on several data such as cost, brand, and the product itself.
In conclusion,
in this fast-evolving world, you'd be surprised how many companies use the Minimum viable product method. Many large companies adopt it before launching a product or service but in different forms and patterns.
Here I offer advice to every entrepreneur who seeks to lead and succeed in the project:
First: To build his assumptions so that they can be applied.
Second: Based on the approach of building the Minimum viable product MVP, a product that, in the early stages of development, possesses as few features as possible and provides a distinct value to the client but with few initial costs and simple equipment.
Minimum viable product method requires experience, recognition of people's experiences, further initial work, and perhaps a set of experiments to test the MVP prototype until the final product is reached and the project successfully launched. But don't forget that it significantly reduces the likelihood of future risks.
