What is MVP? Why is it necessary?
The term Minimum Viable Product (MVP) was first coined by Frank Robinson in 2001, which was later popularized by two distinguished personalities in product design — Steve Blank and Eric Ries. With the introduction of this term start-ups changed the way they operated their product management, but many times this term got misunderstood by people causing a failed model. So what does Minimum Viable Product (MVP) means?
What is a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)?
Eric Reins first defined this term as: “A Minimum Viable Product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.”
This definition can be simplified as “An MVP is a version of a product with minimum and core set of features to meet the product objectives and provide value to the customer, and collect relevant feedback for further development.”
Sometimes people or teams struggle with the term minimum and end up setting more features in the product than required. This leads to a delay in the delivery of the first version of the product, the extra effort needed to rework the product modules that failed to provide value to customers, draining budgets faster, and not meeting the goal.
Are Prototype and MVP different?
Yes, although most of the time they are misunderstood to be one, the concepts of a prototype and an MVP are different.
A prototype is an early model or sample of a product to assess a process or idea. For building a prototype lesser efforts are needed.
The main concept of a prototype is to build many varieties of models and be able to modify, alter, and throw away the idea if necessary.
A prototype is mostly used by the teams to evaluate a process and to enhance the precision and quality of the process or the product.
Unlike a prototype, which is a model to test a product before launching, an MVP is a product with more core features that can be readily released to a larger public to estimate the response of the product.
An MVP cannot be readily discarded as in the case with the prototype as more efforts and resources are spent in the development of the Minimum Viable Product. An MVP expects more technical development as the product can be further developed according to the market response.
How to build an MVP?
- Define the main goal of your product: Take account of the value the product will be offering to the user. Your product should have the potential to solve the problems of users. Does your product have any use to the users? How can they benefit from it? What problems can your product solve? To deliver a better understanding of the product you should be able to answer these questions about your product.
- Do market research: Market research is an important step that most start-ups often skip. There are many similar products in the market, and many times users are reluctant to try anything new.
This is where the market and competitor analysis plays their role.
Performing market analysis helps the start-up to gauge the quality of the service provided by competitors. This allows start-ups to analyze, and try to provide a better solution or feature to your product that may attract customers.
- Define and prioritize the main feature: To ensure a good user experience the first thing you should do is to map out the user flow of your product. To define the user flow you should define the process involved in every stage from the start to the final. After defining the user flow it is important to prioritize the features of your product according to its relevance from high to low.
- Build the MVP: After analyzing and gaining the much-needed insights of the market and substantiating the features you can build your MVP. An MVP should be of similar quality as your final version and satisfy the customer’s need.
- Testing Stage: This final step is one of the most important as it will validate your product last time before launching. In this
stage, the quality, and functionality of the product should be tested by the Quality Assurance Engineers.
What does the cost of an MVP depend upon?
The cost of building an MVP depends upon various factors based on the features and description of the product. Some of the important points on which the costs depends are:
- The capacity of the product, its design, and development work.
- The wireframe of your product.
- The technological stack of your project
- The time required to build your MVP is usually decided by the hourly rates of your development team.
Benefits of an MVP:
- Testing Business concept: Building an MVP helps to get feedback from customers in the early stages which prevents any loss of time and helps to evaluate the functions and idea of the product.
- Understanding user needs: Feedback from users and analysis of collected data helps to learn about user needs which help in the improvement of the product.
- Enhancing user experience: User response and evaluation of product helps the developers to identify unpopular or unwanted features in the product reducing the mess and making the product fast and efficient.
- Developing trust with customers: The early relationship with the customers and solving the problems and listening to feedback from users helps in building a relationship with the customers.
- Cost-efficient: Building an MVP helps in having a clear understanding of the needed features and functionality of a product which helps developers from facing loss by investing money in unwanted functions.
Conclusion:
To summarise everything we have discussed so far, MVP is immensely important. A good MVP model may bring many benefits to your project as well as save you from wasting resources such as money and time.
Borgfy is an organization with some of the most intellectual minds, working passionately and helping start-ups, SMEs, MSME by giving shape to their ideas and developing their products.
At Borgfy, we have experts who are experienced in building up all sorts of projects. If you are considering developing an MVP for your product then get in touch with us at info@borgfy.com or visit our website https://www.borgfy.com.
