The idea of a minimum viable product (MVP) is a central tenet of the lean startup philosophy. It’s a concept designed to prevent startups get their products out to market as quickly as possible and decrease risk if the product fails. But how do you know the minimal point at which a product is viable? At what point, in other words, do you put it out to market?
While the answer to that question will vary from product to product, there are a few key steps you can take when it comes to figuring out if you’ve got an MVP on your hands or if you need to put in a little more development time.
Define your core product
It might seem obvious, but you have very little hope of putting out an MVP if you can’t define your core product in the simplest possible terms.
Could you explain it to someone who knows nothing about your field of expertise? If not, then work on it until you can.
Even though this is your business, you need as many people as possible to understand what it is from the get-go.
One way to do this is to try and explain your product in a Tweet (using the old 140 -character limit). Just remember to avoid jargon at all costs.
Another is to use an existing product that people are familiar with as a guide (eg. Uber, but for pet grooming).
Identify its key features
Defining your core product will help you identify what features are essential and which ones might be nice updates once you’ve got a solid user base.
Let’s continue with our “Uber, but for pet grooming” example.
At a minimum, people need to be able to book a groomer, know the cost, and pay for the service (even the last of these is debatable if you’re willing to send out groomers with mobile card payment terminals).
By identifying these key features, you give your team a relatively small number of things to focus on. That, in turn, means they can get a product out much sooner than if you tried to put out the fully realised version of your product.
Test internally
Your first indication of whether these features are working the way they should will be your internal testing.
How thorough this internal testing is will depend on how many resources you have at your disposal. If you’re a one or two-person shop, there are only so many devices you can test the product out on and only so many scenarios you can play out.
If you’re a bit bigger, you can use people who aren’t on your dev team (e.g. marketing, client service) to try it out.
Just remember that the aim of this testing isn’t to think up new features, but to test the ones you’ve identified as being key.
Find your early adopters
No matter how good your internal testing is, you can’t beat external testing.
For this part of the exercise, you’re going to want to find tech-savvy early adopters. Not only are they more likely to figure out how well your features work in the real world, they’re also more likely to be forgiving of any glitches left in the system.
These customers are also more likely to give you feedback, based on their understanding of your product vision.
You can find these early adopters on social media, other online communities they might inhabit, and the offline spaces they hang out in.
Refine (or move on)
The feedback your early adopters give you will enable you to figure out what refinements you need to make to your core product, or even if you need to ditch it entirely.
If things go well with the external testing, you know you have something viable and push it out further into the market.
At that point you have your MVP.
Of course, that should never be where you leave things. You’re going to constantly build and refine your product.
As you do so, it’s vital to view each new feature as MVPs in their own right. Doing so means each iteration of the total product will be of consistently good quality and therefore more likely to succeed.
