What is an MVP?

It is not necessarily a final product to be launched on the market, but a way of developing a product with the minimum resources and with some potential customers or beta customers who share their feedback in order to test if the product is viable or not.

It focuses on continuous and incremental improvements aimed at better alignment with what is expected from the market and allowing adjustments in the early stages.

Designed by Henrik Knieberg, the first part of the image presents the most common mistake about the iterative and incremental development of a product.

In this case, the customer's desire is to build a car. Henrik raises some questions like, Who wants half a car? or What will the customer do with just one wheel? The answer is nothing. If we continue to build the parts, the customer will remain dissatisfied until it is finished, because, before that, they will never be able to experience anything.

If this happens, imagine the risk of developing everything and only at the end questioning the customer if it was what he was expecting… when he may have already changed his mind and all the work, time and money goes to waste.

The second approach to the image proposes the same objective of building a car, but the focus is on understanding the customer's need, and it is discovered that the real objective is to move from point A to point B.

With this format, the team can develop and receive customer feedback in a timely and incremental way.

Or as Henrik himself stated:

Earliest testable/usable/lovable Product.

The customer receives several products that are minimally viable for use and, consequently, gives feedback on what he thinks, making it possible to improve/evolve the product.

In this way, it is possible to involve all parties from start to finish. Be it the business, the market, or the development team. Optimizing the resources and expectations of all parties.

How Do You Define Your Minimum Viable Product?

How do you develop a minimum viable product, and how will your team know when you have an MVP ready for launch? Here are a few strategic steps to take.

1. Make sure your planned MVP aligns with your business objectives.

Before weighing which features to build, the first step in developing your MVP is to make sure the product will align with your team’s or your company’s strategic goals.

Also, ask what purpose this minimum viable product will serve. For example, will it attract new users in a market adjacent to the market for your existing products? If that is one of your current business objectives, then this MVP plan might be strategically viable.

2. Start identifying specific problems you want to solve or improvements you want to enable for your user persona.

You will need to be strategic in deciding which limited functionality to include in your MVP. You can base these decisions on several factors, including:

• User research
• Competitive analysis
• How quickly you’ll be able to iterate on certain types of functionality when you receive user feedback
• The relative costs to implement the various user stories or epics

3. Translate your MVP functionality into a plan of development action.

Now that you’ve weighed the strategic elements above and settled on the limited functionality you want for your MVP, it’s time to translate this into an action plan for development.

Note: It’s essential to keep in mind the V in MVP—the product must be viable. That means it must allow your customers to complete an entire task or project and provide a high-quality user experience. An MVP cannot be a user interface with many half-built tools and features. It must be a working product that your company should be able to sell.

Good luck and make amazing MVPs!