Minimum Viable Product (MVP) helps a startup team begin to learn the process of learning as quickly as possible. MVP should not be confused with the smallest imaginable product. MVP allows you to test an idea by exposing an early version of your product to the target users and customers,to collect the relevant data, and to learn from it. Contrary to traditional product development, which involves throwing tons of money on building a product to perfection, the goal of MVP is to come up with the ultimate product. MVP unlike a pilot project is designed not to just test the product design or feature but to test the fundamental business postulate.
Eric Ries in his book ‘The Lean Startup’ came up with the BuildMeasure-Learn feedback loop. The core of the startup models can be fitted into this Lean Startup model outlined by Eric Ries. In startups, an idea is turned into a product. As customers use the product, the feedback and data generated becomes useful learning for the product developer to further refine the product in the least possible time.
Startup face immense challenge in identifying features that are not essential when rolling out the MVP considering that the goal is to come with version of the product that enables a full turn of the Build- Measure-Learn loop with minimum effort and least amount of development time. The product development team should be able to ensure that customers do not face any issues when using the minimum features of the product.Simply stated,the product may not necessarily have all the features in the first release but the features provided should work without any issues and be able to achieve the intended usage of the customer. The product team should not fall into the trap of rolling out their best product idea or best designed product. The focus of the product team should be to launch the first version of the product without any bugs in the least possible time, get feedback of the users and incorporate the key learnings into the product in the subsequent release. The product team should realize that the MVP launched for customers may deliberately lack many advanced features that may be useful at a later stage, for an expert user of the product.
Startups need to realize that despite the merits of MVP, there is certain amount of risk in adopting the MVP strategy. The risk is especially from those customers who use the product after paying and find that it does not meet even their basic requirements or it has bugs that are irritating for them to use the product. In such cases the users may not return to buy the subsequent release of the productor even may not use the product even when the subsequent version of the product is given free.
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The concept of MVP can be sacrilege for many entrepreneurs and quality professionals who believe in perfection of end product when rolled out to customers. Their expectation about their product is very high, state-of-the art and that catches attention of the users. They will spend huge effort and resource in developing a product which would meet their expectation but may struggle to get customer validation. Such a scenario is a sure disaster for a startup that plans to launch a successful product. To quote Eric Ries: “If we do not know who the customer is, we do not know what quality is.” Many early stage startups in the beginning of 2000 startup boom suffered because of the entrepreneurs trying to come with a perfect product spending huge effort and time without trying to get early customer feedback and validation, thereby becoming financially unviable.
There is no readymade formula that can help to decide essential features for a MVP. Deciding how complex a MVP should be requires judgment which many a times, the startup entrepreneurs may lack. The best way to arrive at MVP is to simplify as much as possible and have only those features that are essential to validate initial assumptions and that can be quickly built into the product.
How many features the product should have to appeal to early adopters is a tough but critical question which will need a good understanding of the domain for which the product will cater. Every extra feature that is provided in the product which is not useful for early user of the product is a wasted effort which would inflate the product development cost. The important lesson of MVP is that any additional work of the product development to add features beyond what is required to learn customer requirements is a waste, no matter how important it may seem to the product development team.
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The focus of the product development team needs to be creating the MVP that helps them to test and get answers about few assumptions of theirs from their target customer. Eric Ries illustrates the example of Zappos, the biggest online retailer on how they went with a small scale experiment to validate their assumption about target customers. The founder of Zappos, Nick Swinmurn felt that there was no online store where one could get great selection of shoes. He began his experiment not by creating huge inventory of shoes and investing in an e-commerce backend. Instead, he went to local shoe shops asked shop owner’s permission to take photos of shoes and put them online. Once the orders were received from retail customers, he went to the shop, bought the pair that was ordered, shipped it, handled payments, returns… all of it himself. Obviously it was not a scalable business model, but it was an experiment designed to answer one question: is there already sufficient demand for a superior online shopping experience for shoes? Nick was able to validate most of his assumptions with a very little investment in shortest possible time.
For startups that need to be successful and grow, the MVP model can be very effective to avoid getting into the trap of being satisfied with limited set of customers. MVP model allows startups to bring out successive versions of the product at minimum development cost and release product in minimum time. If one studies the pattern followed by successful product companies, many of them admit that their initial mistake was to develop the product with too many features. Successful ones soon realized that they can’t be everything to everybody. Startups should not confuse less-features product with lowquality product. When MVPs are perceived as low-quality product by customers it becomes an opportunity for startup to learn about attributes that customers care about. Such an approach to product development would be much better than merely speculating about customer needs and will provide a solid basis to build future products that are successful in the real world.
