How To Create A Successful Minimal Viable Product — MVP
Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time — Elon Musk
Last week my team and I were discussing about how to create a successful Minimal Viable Product — MVP and why most organizations struggle to have good market-driven strategies for their products. And in most product management teams, everyone wants their products to be perfect for the first launch without doing much background research.
I have been into product management for around 4 years now and helped my clients create dozens of MVP products and some of them are very successful for the end-users and appreciated by the client’s organization.
People don’t use a product because of the great design; great design helps them use the product — Steve Jobs
Suppose you have a great idea for a product and you think it could be the greatest hit once it’s available in the market.
Before you even working on that great idea, you may need to create MVP (Minimal Viable Product) to show it to your investors, do some user-based (focused group) study and capture the responses/reactions on your product and see how it’s going to be the right fit in today’s market and capitalize the idea in the future.
It’s always a risk when you have to work on a big idea where you are investing your time, money, and efforts to work on that product.
First, let’s understand what is the minimal viable product means- a minimum viable product, or MVP, is a product that has enough features to create and attach niche users or customer base.
You record their experience, feedback/suggestions and work on the enhancement and features on the same product and create an improved version of your product. Once it’s available, you cater to a wider user base.
In the software industry or IT, the MVP can help the product team receive user feedback as quickly as possible to iterate and improve the product. Product Managers and Product Owners mostly do continuous development and frequent releases for new features to make products more attractive and user-friendly.
If you are a part of a start-up company or already established one but working on a new additional product feature, you may be interested to scale up your business idea instead of trying to create the world’s greatest product.
All the products you know are highly successful, started small like Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, Airbnb, Zappos, Dropbox, Twitter, etc and over the years they have become leaders in their industry and have millions of user base and billions in revenue.
Here are some good product strategies I used to create successful MVPs. It includes a high-level plan describing in terms of what the business wants to accomplish with the product, and how it plans to do so.
This strategy will answer key questions such as who the product will serve — your user base, how it will benefit those users, and what are the company’s goals/mission for the product throughout its life-cycle.
Define the problem statement
When you are thinking about an idea or you already have an idea, the question you should ask is, what is the exact problem you are trying to solve here with your product. A few key questions you can ask are:
1-How it’s going to help users and how they are going to fit in their life, work.
2- What is the potential market you are going to target, is it already exhausted or still have scope for your product.
The known market space — Red Oceans as all the industries in existence today.
All the industries not existing yet — Blue Oceans describes the unknown market space.
3- What you can do differently compared to your competitors or from already available highly successful products.
4- What product feature needs to be developed first — Features Prioritization.
5- How are you planning to build, scale, and sell your product — Market and Brand Strategy.
Be specific while answering these questions, yet detailed to capture all of your thoughts. This will help you to create a vision and road map for your MVP.
Once you have an idea of these questions, go to my next step.
Validate learning through your Product
While you may not be able to turn your minimum viable product into a million-dollar product. But this can help you to learn the intricacies of your product.
It can help you out to scale up your product function or even help you to create your future product based on your learning and experiences that you gained.
You can create an outline for your product through design, or just a high-level diagram of your product.
It will help you create a rough map for your product and further you can add details as you go ahead in your final MVP product creation.
Create an early niche user base
You can do closed or focused group user studies and research to create your niche user base.
This goes something like this, have a 10–15 people group from different backgrounds and walks of life. You can share the idea about your product and what it does and what you are possibly planning to accomplish with this study.
It will give valuable feedback immediately that you can incorporate in your product and release in the next versions.
You can even seek help and suggestion from the customer success team in your product area.
Study your competitor products
See how you can be different from them — you may have a similar idea about a product that has already been successful in the market or have a loyal user base.
Identify gaps that they haven’t addressed in their product or what problems they are trying to solve.
If you could be 1% different from the existing product, you will have more chances to create a successful product.
As per Netflix, their main competitor is YouTube, not Amazon Prime or other streaming platforms.
You can use SEO tools to get your competitor reports and analysis and where your product land.
Create an attractive prototype for your product
It’s important to have a working and impressive prototype for your product.
This can help you to get users, find the right investors, or even help you to identify flaws and issues within your product.
You can share this prototype with your friends, investors and gather feedback on what they think, and collect responses.
You can even create a landing page (or a front page for your website in Java or HTML & CSS). Add right SEO filters so that users can find your page.
This way you can generate traffic for your product. You can also add survey links and ask users to answer a few questions that can help you to make your product more viable and successful.
Last but not the least
Choose the right technology — the framework for your product and it’s related to my previous point.
When you are working on building a prototype or an MVP tool kit, choose the right framework that is most suitable for your product. You can even create a POC (Proof Of Concept) before deciding which way you want to go.
If you are going to use CSS, bootstrap is one of the most common front-end frameworks.
You can use pay as you go method for your product if you are going to use cloud-based technologies.
All the leading cloud providers — AWS, MS Azure, Google Cloud have a ready-to-use development tool kit and management platform that you can use. You only need to pay for the resources you are going to consume. You can easily scale up and scale down your platform without any hustle.
I know it’s lots of information but to summarize in three steps, define your product value, find a niche user base, analyze and research your competitor products to make your product more attractive and different in the market.
Hope these points are going to set and outline a road map for your product journey. After you launch MVP, you can gather feedback and experience from your users. It will help in identifying areas where the product is lacking and ensures market validation and a successful launch.
At the same time, it can also help you generate new ideas. With strategy-based user behavior research data, you can make subsequent versions of your product more attractive and valuable.
Be Bold
Be Courageous
Be Your Best
If you like reading this story, check out my other work.
