Building a Minimum Viable Product: What to Consider Before You Start
A minimum viable product (MVP) is the first version of a product containing only core features. Businesses use MVPs to introduce a new product to the audience and test its market demand.
This process is beneficial for companies because it allows them to gather information on how their new product sits with users through their behaviour and feedback while keeping costs to a minimum. Additionally, it reduces time-to-market, which helps businesses stay competitive even in the most fast-paced industries.
To successfully develop an MVP, there are some important steps you must follow. In this article, we are going to talk about what you should consider before starting to develop your MVP.
Defining Your MVP
Determine your target audience and conduct research on their needs and pain points to get valuable insights on what problems your MVP should fix. A new product on the market should be valuable enough that potential customers want to test and buy it. Your MVP must present a simple and effective solution to a problem users face.
Doing this will help you define the most important features to include in your MVP and avoid unnecessary complexity and resource waste.
Identifying MVP Features
After establishing who your target users are and what problems your MVP will tackle, it is time to determine what features you will include in your MVP.
Identify which features are indispensable to solve the pain points you detected in the previous step. Prioritise the features based on the importance of their role in solving the problem. That will help avoid feature creep, which refers to the common mistake of adding more features to the product than is necessary. The main goal is to solve core problems, so implement only core features.
Gathering User Feedback
One of the purposes of launching an MVP in the market is to get valuable feedback from users. Feedback helps you understand the product’s performance, what users like and dislike, and, most importantly, if it addresses their pain points.
Evaluate how users perceive your MVP by employing methods to gather feedback, such as user testing, surveys, or interviews.
Choosing Your Technology Stack
Technology stacks are responsible for your product’s functionality. Your project requirements are essential to determine which technology stacks you should choose. Front-end and back-end technologies focus on basic elements, such as user interface and data management, respectively.
If your product contains extra features and functionalities, there are many other technology stacks you should explore and implement. For example, if your product involves augmented reality, your AR developers should use specialised AR frameworks.
MVP Launch and Beyond
Ensure you promote your product correctly when you reach the launching time. Choose the best-suited launch channels (mailing lists, social media, ads, etc.) according to your target audience’s habits and behaviour.
As your product enters the market, you must think about the future and start planning future development and expansion to drive product success. Develop a product roadmap to help you organise how your product should evolve. Then, keep an attentive eye on user feedback and stay up-to-date on technology trends to always offer the latest features and functionality.
Conclusion
The Minimum Viable Product is a simple version of a product that businesses introduce in the market to evaluate how the audience perceives it. This approach is crucial for companies – especially startups – because it allows them to test the waters without investing significant amounts of capital on products that might not sell. Additionally, the MVP helps businesses enhance their products thanks to valuable feedback from early customers.
Before starting to develop your MVP, consider these steps: which problems to tackle, which core features to include, how to collect user feedback, which technology stack to use, and how to launch your MVP.
