What Is A Minimal Viable Product And How To Create One

Introduction To Minimal Viable Products

According to the IIBA:

Minimal Viable Product (MVP) is used to avoid the cost and risk associated with developing the wrong product by testing a hypothesis, reducing waste, or increasing speed to customers for feedback and adoption.

High-Level Steps In Creating A MVP

Determine The Problem To Be Solved

Ensure that the product fulfills the target users’ needs. Consider things like: What value does the product offer to its users? How can it benefit them? It should also be clear what the essential estimations are for the product.

Identify A Minimum Set Of Features

Prioritize all the features the MVP will support. Ask questions like: What do the users want? Is this product offering them something beneficial?

Arrange the features in the product backlog in order of priority; high, medium and low. At this stage, you can even create a prototype of the MVP.

Create & Launch The MVP

Build the MVP ensuring it is easy to use, engaging and suitable for the users. Validate it through testing.

Elicit & Analyze Feedback

Collect users feedback to determine the acceptability. End users are the ones who can tell what is missing and what is redundant. Based on feedback, start improving the product. Once improvements are made, test again, deploy the improvements, elicit feedback again. This process repeats until the product is finalized.

Minimal Viable Product Elements

Target Audience

No matter how good a product is, it will still fail if you are not able to find the ideal target audience. If you try to target everyone, you will end up with no one.

Goal To Achieve Or Hypothesis To Test

Keep in mind that at this stage, you want to launch the smallest, simplest version of the product; just enough to test that the problem exists, that the problem is important enough and that the product solves the problem.

Mechanism To Measure

Qualitative and quantitative feedback have a different role to play and thus you need to find the correct balance between them to find a well suited solution that can help make intelligent changes.

Quantitative feedback via metrics helps to determine whether tasks were easy or difficult to perform. It assesses the usability of the design.

Qualitative feedback helps identify the quality and user friendliness of the features of the product. It assesses the usability of the product by helping developers analyze the specific and problematic UI elements.

Defined Requirements

Develop a minimum set of requirements based on the previous three steps.

Strengths Of Minimal Viable Product

• Saves money
• Less expensive than building a complete product
• Costs and risks are significantly reduced

Limitations Of Minimum Viable Product

It’s not always easy to select a subset of the features

Creating a MVP is about the analysis and strategy rather than the development. You test your theories and refine your ideas through your user base. It provides you with a tool to learn about what your customers want and like without wasting time and resources.