What is an agile approach to creating a minimum viable product?

MVP is not about perfection - it's about learning, refining, and avoiding the mistake of building what nobody needs. It is also not limiting "features" your product has, but understanding the the value it should provide and jobs to be done.

Here's our process for the student hackathons: Define: Prioritize your core problem and target audience. Focus on essential features that deliver value and solve user pain points. + Iterate: Work in short sprints, prioritize rapid learning and embrace change based on user feedback and market insights. +Collaborate: Foster open communication and collaboration between cross-functional teams. = ?Minimum Viable Product: Build the simplest version that delivers value and solves the core problem. + Continuous Improvement: regularly gather feedback and iterate based on user insights and data. Result: NEVER STOP LEARNING!

I have come to reject the concept of MVP as it is understood today. The traditional thinking is that an MVP can teach the company about what is important and product potential. In my experience, MVP are not good at demonstrating anything much - not market fit or market value. Let’s remember, it was VCs who promoted the idea of MVPs to reduce their risk. MVP gives VCs the chance to throttle the funds they have to invest. If you believe in the product, then build a great product from the start. Sure it is risky, but if you want to understand the value of the real idea, the core solution has to operative from the beginning. I know this runs counter to traditional thinking, but creating great products usually is counter-intuitive.

One of the most important phases in the product development process is creating an MVP. It enables you to test your product early on with actual people so you can collect their feedback and ensure you're headed in the right direction. Additionally, it is far more economical and effective than developing a fully functional product from the ground up.

Rather than striving for perfection from the start, build your MVP incrementally, allowing for quick adaptations based on real-world feedback.

Infuse customer-centricity into your agile mindset. Ensure that every decision and iteration is driven by a deep understanding of your customers' needs and preferences!

While I have not reviewed all contributions on this topic, let me offer a (possibly) different perspective: an agile approach is about team empowerment to drive customer value. Mind you that the team is not only composed of technical minds but of a group of people willing to create customer value by listening to the customer and being willing to review previous assumptions based on customer feedback and real world data.

Quando lancei minha empresa, com praticamente zero dinheiros, pegamos o e-commerce mais barato (R$ 9 por mês) porque ele entregava o que precisava. Reduzios muito o custo mensal da opera??o até validar o negócio e ter seguran?a de aportar mais dinheiro. Use tudo gratuito que está a seu alcance. E melhore aos poucos, conforme ganha feedbacks. Meu mantra: ?"Se você n?o sente vergonha da primeira vers?o do seu produto, é porque come?ou tarde demais." Reid Hoffman

An agile approach simply means testing each step before committing too far down a track. Can we find a customer base before we spend $1M building something nobody wants is the big one. There are 1000s of small steps within that big one. Each step isn’t a go/no go thing, instead your exploring to find “the one way it might just work” and discard the 100 ways it won’t. Many think it sounds like you don’t plan, which is wrong, you do, you plan as far forward as you can, you just have to be prepared to throw away elements and adjust the plan as you progress.

An agile approach basically means to be willing to learn. The Lean Startup framework by Eric Ries embodies this approach best. 1. Build something to test in the marketplace 2. Measure the results it generates 3. Learn where there is room for improvement 4. Repeat the cycle The faster you can go through this cycle, the faster you'll get better results.

Consider two different ways of building your MVP: Option 1: Waterfall In this traditional method, you spend resources meticulously planning every feature. You execute on your plan precisely, spending until the product is "complete". The first interaction your customer has with the product is months down the line. Now it's a gamble: if it sucks your company is dead. Option 2: Agile You allocate the minimum amount of resources outlining the core benefit you want to bring to your customer. You build something fast and put it in front of customers as quickly as possible. It sucks, but you get actual customer feedback to improve. You improve it, and launch, and improve. Now you're building precisely what the customer wants. Option 1 or 2?

An agile approach is dynamic, prioritizing customer satisfaction and iterative progress. It values individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation, and responding to change over following a plan. Agile methods break work into small increments, minimizing long-term planning to adapt quickly. Teams collaborate in short sprints, allowing for frequent reassessment and adaptation, ensuring the end product truly meets user needs. This leads to high-quality deliverables, as continuous feedback is integrated into each step. Agile is less about rigid structures and more about a flexible mindset that embraces learning and growth.

I agree with the statement that the agile approach is part of team culture and mindset. I have seen founders become locked in on their vision, blind to the feedback provided by the marketplace. This can be deadly to the company and extremely frustrating to the team. I do believe, the agile approach is an ideal way to bring a product to market that you are 100% confident will have traction. This also provides solid data that is very attractive to investors, but there must be mindset alignment before beginning this approach. The agile process requires flexibility and the acceptance that there are "no sacred cows allowed." We as a team agree to respond and iterate based on consumer feedback not on what we think it should be.

When it comes to your MVP, you need to prioritize the most critical features that align with your product or service Focus first on functionalities that deliver the most value to your users so you're addressing core needs first & avoiding unnecessary complexity on the MVP build out This reduces GTM timeframe, costs, & helps you reiterate your MVP quickly

Generally if you've identified a gap in the market and are building an MVP, the likelihood you're in a race against time (whether vs a competitor, market trend etc.). Neither the time nor money you invest into bringing a new product to market will matter if you've missed the boat delivering every Must on the MoSCoW in one large drop. You also don't want to find out that you didn't have product market fit in the first place... it's better for a mistake to be cheap.

In Agile approach always use fail fast and forward method , creating a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) involves breaking down the project into small, manageable tasks, prioritizing them based on value, and delivering a functional product incrementally. Use iterative development cycles, receive feedback regularly, and adjust priorities accordingly. Emphasize collaboration, adaptability, and continuous improvement within your development team to ensure flexibility and responsiveness to changing requirements.

For me, I lead with my top-line goal: revenue. I ask, "What is the minimum solution I can provide to my customers to get them to pay me right away?" Then, I work backward from there.

First, we need to understand the purpose. The purpose of an MVP is to test and iterate towards unlocking the first line of 'value delivery' to your prospective customers. There's just two things to do: Talk to users, Ship product. When you're tackling an MVP the agile way, picture it like building blocks. Start with the essentials, prioritize them, and get something basic up and running fast. Once you've got that initial version, gather feedback, make tweaks, and repeat. It's a fluid process—stay flexible, adapt to changes, and keep fine-tuning as you go.

The key is to understand the value drivers important to the customer and prioritize them. Address the critical product attributes and sample key customers (validation partners). Collect feedback to obtain a first impression of which attributes are good enough (doesn't have to be perfect), tweak to improve and sample again. An agile iterative approach by sampling multiple customers is a good way to launch MVPs.

Identifying what , who , when and how a product shall be used / consumed gives us to build the basic guidelines for an agile approach to an MVP.

1. Define your MVP: 2. Develop a digital twin: 3. Integrate with the Metaverse: 4. Gather user feedback: 5. Analyze feedback and identify improvements: 6. Iterate on your MVP: 7. Test the updated version: 8. Repeat the process: By leveraging Metaverse and digital twins, you can rapidly prototype, test, and refine your MVP in a virtual environment, saving time and resources compared to physical prototyping.

Leverage the build-measure-learn loop alongside 'Design Thinking.' This combination allows for empathetic and insightful iterations based on customer feedback, ensuring that each version of your MVP performs better and resonates more deeply with your users.

The key thing is to change only 1 thing at a time. If you change more than that, you’re never sure which change made the difference. You’re also not sure if 1 change was right but 2 other changes created a new blocker. The hard bit is getting the right sequence of things to test.

As a company consistently engaged in the agile development of new products, it's imperative to invest in tools that continually strengthen the organization as a whole. Beyond client-centric development, building a robust set of tools and fostering a company culture centered around these tools is critical for shaping a successful MVP strategy. This strategic investment goes hand in hand with an agile approach, facilitating not only the understanding of user behavior but also the rapid iteration and improvement of MVPs. These tools become indispensable assets, ensuring that the agile methodology is complemented by a data-driven infrastructure, enhancing both the creation and enhancement of products within the MVP framework.

I try to optimize for revenue straight out of the bat. So I tend to skew the team's (read as dev) bandwidth in favor of optimizations and features that minimize churn and drive conversions/usage.

Don’t overthink your MVP and don’t think that it has to even be a version of your product. The thing is that an MVP can be anything that helps you validate your hypothesis that whether the market needs this product or not A friend of mine recently launched an MVP for his ping pong ?? club business in less than 10 mins by creating a fake Google Maps profile of his yet to be launched biz. And he started getting a lot of calls the next day. This was a much better MVP than having to spend tens of thousands of dollars on launching an actual business.

Your MVP exists to test a theory, and in most cases it’s determining whether there is traction of some sort: does it capture an audience? does it attract users? does it generate revenue? does it peak interest from early stage or angel investors? whatever your northstar metric for traction, hone in on it and focus your finances, staffing, product development, marketing, and management of the MVP on this KPI/set of KPIs. Simplify and then expand vs. the other way around.

MVPs plays a key role in startup validation Keep your first build simple By building just the essential features, you get to launch sooner, gather real user feedback, & see if your idea clicks with your audience MVPs saves time, money, & guides you on the right path before going full throttle into development

As the sayin goes, “If you’re happy with your first product, you launched too late.” Building in public gets customers involved/engaged throughout the process and one of the best way to ensure that a product is a painkiller is to charge even a small amount to test their willingness to pay for it.

Far too many companies forget either the 'Minimum' or 'Viable' parts of an MVP. If you're a product manager working on a new product you should be asking constantly if what you're building matters right now. Also consult your users or early adopters constantly. You'll be surprised how willing to engage they are when they know you're trying to build something that will improve their quality of life. The feedback will be invaluable and quite often you'll find you don't need to do that extra feature/requirement before shipping.