The top tech brands didn’t start with fully polished, expansive products or services. Their journeys began with simple products that solved a specific customer pain point. With extensive market research, data analysis, and consistent iteration, those simple products evolved into mature solutions. This takes years of work, and most products fail, but you can increase your chance at success if you start with an MVP or minimum viable product or minimum viable product.
Many businesses don’t have the resources to bet on releasing a finalized product without knowing if it’s primed for success. A well-developed MVP gives you that insight. Here’s why the MVP phase is such a crucial step in the product development process.
Starting with an MVP will let you focus on core functionalities
An MVP contains just enough core features to satisfy early adopters and test viability. The main goal is to focus on core functionality and test one hypothesis. With product development focused on a clear goal, you can keep excess features at bay and avoid under or over-developing. Simple, functional products are also easier for users to adopt. To start with an MVP will let your users use your product for its core purpose right away, enabling you to collect user feedback and iterate faster.
Receive Feedback for Actionable Improvements
With users telling you, after direct engagement with your product, what’s working, what’s not, and what they want, the MVP phase of development helps you set priorities for the subsequent iterations. User feedback combined with hard data provides a complete picture of how your product is performing. You can get to the core of the problem users are trying to solve with your product and learn how they talk about its key features. Remaining open and flexible to user feedback ensures you release a product that satisfies the market.
Validate Product-Market Fit
One of the most important questions an MVP helps you answer is whether there’s a demand for your product. Churn rate, the volume of inbound inquiries and referrals, and net promoter score are ways you can measure how well your product’s value proposition is resonating with users. Other KPIs such as number of potential users, growth in potential users, and ease of user acquisition let you know if you’re targeting a market that’s conducive to your success.1
Start with an MVP: Develop and Iterate Faster
In an emerging or fast-changing market, time is especially important for competitive advantage and product success. Starting with an MVP will allow you to take advantage of your window of opportunity to break out as an industry leader. Speed is everything. Not only for the sake of staying ahead of your competition but establishing a culture of moving quickly to evolve and improve quickly.2
You won’t be able to send world-class software to market right away. But, you can focus on achieving gradual success with an MVP that maximizes your understanding of what’s most valuable to users. Learn how to build an MVP process that puts you on the path to the right product by downloading our eBook, “MVP Development and Executions.”
1 Chen, Andrew.“When has a consumer startup hit product/market fit.” Andrew Chen.
2 Fridman, Adam. “4 Reasons Speed is Everything in Business.” Inc. 2015.