MVP Development: A Guide to Planning a Minimum Viable Product

What is MVP and what are the benefits of MVP development?

If we review the statistics on the startups, we can see that building a new business from the ground up is incredibly challenging. According to Investopedia, the failure rate of startups in 2019 was around 90%, with 21.5% failing in the first year, 30% in the second year, 50% in the fifth year, and a staggering 70% in their 10th year.

With such gloomy numbers, it’s only natural for businesses to want to do everything in their power to secure success. 

This is where MVP development comes in to help businesses of all sizes test their product without going full scale.

What Is MVP?

MVP stands for a Minimum Viable Product, a term used to describe a minimal version of a product that contains only the most basic features that are sufficient to attract and satisfy the early adopter customers. 

The goal of MVP is to develop a working product that provides value to users, while minimizing the expenses.

This is a great way for startups and innovators to bring their ideas to life with the least amount of effort, while being guided with feedback from real customers.

Also, it allows them to validate their product idea in the early phases of product development. For instance, an MVP website can contain a single landing page and a contact form as long as it solves at least one user problem.

If it turns out it’s converting well, and there is a market for your idea, then you will elaborate the website design beyond the minimum amount of functionalities.

To be successful, this stripped down version of a product needs to solve a user problem or address a certain need from the beginning.

What Are the Benefits of Building a Minimum Viable Product?

Even well-established and world-renowned apps like Instagram, Airbnb and Spotify were initially built as MVPs. From their humble beginnings they grew into industry’s giants as a result of years of development and large investment. 

On that note, a minimum viable product can help you secure success while introducing a new product in the market in multiple ways.

It’s main benefits include:

• eleasing a product quickly,
• attracting investors and securing funding,
• minimizing risks and optimizing costs,
• checking whether the product fits the market (and what resonates with the target market),
• receiving genuine feedback,
• scalability and flexibility – the ability to make tweaks easily,
• a way to improve your product

Identifying Business Needs:

Your MVP has to be aligned with your business goals. Before taking any further steps like deciding on the core features that need to be built, make sure to identify your company’s strategic goals.

For instance, if your organisation has limited resources, or it’s trying to reach a revenue number in the upcoming months, this information can affect your decision on whether the timing is right to build MVP. 

If you’re working on a budget, creating an MVP with WordPress is a great way to test your assumptions without investing a lot of financial resources into the first version of your web product.

Then, ask yourself whether the product you want to develop solves any existing problem. There has to be a need for your product in the market. 

If the answer is a definite “yes”, the next things to consider are how it will solve the problem in question and how big is the market you want to enter.

Identifying Success Criteria:

To make sure your app is going in the right direction, you need concrete figures and metrics. In other words, you need to identify a list of success criteria. Define the metrics that can help you determine whether your product is successful. 

Depending on the app, the metrics you need may differ, but generally speaking, these factors will give you an overview of how your product is doing:

• user engagement
• number of downloads
• percentage of active users
• percentage of paying users
• customer lifetime

For example, you may define having 10,000 active monthly users or reaching a certain number of retained users over a period of time as the success of your product. 

And of course, obtaining feedback from the users is invaluable in iterating the product further and ensuring a successful final product. building a community, forums

Determine and Write Down a Long-Term Goal:

Before starting with MVP software development, the first and the most important thing is to define what problem it will solve. Ask yourself: why are you developing your MVP in the first place? What do you want your product to achieve further in the future? 

For example, entrepreneurs who are focused on developing new social networks, may define their long-term goal as reaching a certain number of users, or developing on both Android and iOS even though the preliminary version will be offered on one of them only.

Write down the overall goal of your project to guide you and your team along the way and help you make important business decisions during the development process. 

Securing ongoing technical support is an important part of your idea’s success, as developers who were working along with you during the entire process will help your product reach its full potential while being excellent advisors on further MVP software development.

Mapping Out the User Journey:

Pinpointing the problem that needs to be solved or a need that should be addressed is the first obstacle to overcome in MPV development. The next step focuses on discovering opportunities to resolve users’ issues. 

Start with mapping out your users’ journey. It is a vital part of software development as it allows you to get a better understanding of how your users interact with your product. 

Consider these things when developing a user journey:

• identify the user(s) who will be using your product (you can have multiple categories of users),
• identify the actions that user needs to take in order to achieve the goal and reach the story end,
• Identify the story endings (user’s goal, i.e. transferring money)

The next step is creating a pain and gain map for all the actions that the user needs to complete. Write down the actions that the user takes when using the app and all of the pain points and gains for each action.

Organizing this map in a chart can help you get a better picture of the user’s pain points and the gains they get when each of them is resolved.

The pain and gain map will enable you to focus your product on the areas that have the greatest potential of adding value. 

Finally, use this data to define opportunity statements. You can summarize the pains and gains into “How might we” format to make it easier for you to determine the most important and impactful functionalities to develop.

MVP Feature Prioritizing:

At this early stage of the product development cycle, most startups should focus on building a lean MVP. What does it mean? Condense down what your users need and stick to a simple set of things. 

This is a critical step of software development where many businesses fail, because they want to address all or many of their users’ problems and encompass all of their potential users. 

When deciding which functionalities to include in your MVP, prioritize those that provide maximum user value for least investment and effort. The previous step with its opportunity statements can help in determining which features to build first. 

Be strategic about it and base your final decision on these factors:

1. Competitive analysis
2. User research
3. The cost of implementing certain functionalities
4. The amount of time required to iterate on certain user stories or epics

Prioritization matrix, the MoSCoW method, and Story Mapping can be helpful in identifying MVPs core features and selecting those that are the most valuable at this stage too.

Prioritization matrix utilizes two axes: effort and impact to prioritize features. One the app is launched and you’ve collected users’ feedback you can reconsider its functionalities again using this technique, and create a new pull of features to be analyzed for future development. 

The MoSCoW analysis comes down to allocating potential MVP features to four categories: must-haves (M), should-haves (S), could-haves (C), and will not have (W). 

This popular prioritization framework helps in deciding what features are essential and need to be developed first, and which ones can come later.

On the other hand, User Story Mapping enables startups to visualize the complete system. It involves breaking down all the general actions and all of the tasks included in each action in a chronological order. 

This is a highly effective way to check whether you are moving in the right direction and whether the system you conceived is too complicated. Also, it is incredibly helpful in simplifying things, so your users can accomplish what they want with as little steps as possible.

Testing Your MVP

This is an important stage of the MVP software development. The goal is to come up with an optimal version that you can put on the market. When you’ve completed the previous steps, you can utilize the following testing strategies for your MVP:

• Wizard of Oz
• Concierge MVPs
• Piecemeal MVPs
• Single Feature MVPs
• Prototypes
• Interview With Customers
• Ad Campaigns

Wizard of Oz is a fast and effective testing method that allows entrepreneurs to test a large number of hypotheses and find adequate solutions. It creates an illusion of a fully developed product while it’s dependent on the manual work of the project staff or utilizes open-source-tools.

This approach allows you to quickly create prototypes and verify the demand for the product without really creating a thing. 

Concierge MVPs strategy is based on providing services to a small user group. Again, the work of features is done manually, but in comparison to the Wizard of Oz technique users know your website or app haven’t been operating before.

Concierge MVPs approach allows businesses to communicate with real customers and collect their reviews and impressions. 

Piecemeal MVPs allows entrepreneurs to invest minimal amounts of money and effort, and create the foundation for their product out of existing components (via open-source services and ready-made tools) that get put together.

They get to validate their idea with minimal development costs included. If it turns out the further development of the product is justified, that’s where custom-built solutions come in to improve the functionalities of this preliminary version.

For certain businesses, it will be appropriate to go with a single feature of an MVP. Take PayPal for example. The feature that defines the entire functionality is money transfer. In this case, you need to pick a core feature and develop it further.

When it comes to prototypes, companies can decide to make digital ones that include mobile or web layouts that mimic real user experience in detail, or paper versions like sketches and clippings that are simpler to implement. 

You can also test your business hypothesis by conducting interviews with customers and get valuable feedback on whether the landing pages are appealing, what features are the most popular, and most importantly on the usage cycle.

This is how Uber got to where it is today. 

You can take advantage of platforms like Facebook and Google too, and identify features of your app or your site with the most demand from target users. This approach allows companies to track and and analyze relevant metrics like conversion rates and click-through rates.

If everything is alright, you can finally give access to the first users. Collect feedback from these early adopters, as well as statistics and behavior analytics and thoroughly analyze this data. 

As mentioned earlier, validation from users is essential in understanding what customers want from your application and coming up with an app that is sure to thrive.

The Takeaway:

Ultimately, when you choose MVP development instead of starting full-scale development, you are verifying your initial idea first and laying the foundation for future success. This simple version of your product allows you to gradually build up and produce a better product.

Through collecting user feedback and checking product-market fit, you can make an informed decision on whether creating a fully-featured product makes sense or you need to make certain changes to the original idea to ensure it will be a profitable investment.