How do you transition a minimum viable product to a full product?

Defining a product vision and roadmap is pivotal. The product vision sets the long-term goal, inspiring teams, guiding decisions, aligning stakeholders, and providing direction. It must be concise, ambitious and enduring. A product roadmap outlines the journey to achieve the vision, prioritizing features and fostering innovation. It's vital for strategy, alignment and measuring progress.

Getting broad support for a vision and a roadmap (albeit unvalidated at this stage) is crucial at senior levels but also within the project/delivery team. Alongside the vision and strategy it is important to establish or re-establish the roles, responsibilities, values and culture within the team. Products get imagined, validated, developed, tested and operated by teams and those teams must have a common understanding of how they work together, especially so if the team, or individuals in the team, are new.

Defining a clear vision and plotting a roadmap is integral to a product's journey. Especially in the realm of AI-driven solutions for advanced wound care, a lucid vision helps navigate the complexities of healthcare needs. The roadmap acts as the GPS, ensuring we stay on track, anticipating challenges, and adapting as needed. As the healthcare landscape evolves, so must our vision and strategies, ensuring that the end goal of improved patient outcomes always remains in focus.

Often it is quality of life features that are removed from the MVP backlog in favor of essentials. This is the time to add them back in. If they truly do improve QoL, it will reinvigorate the user base and generate more enthusiasm in the process.

To form a vision and roadmap based on your MVP, follow these steps: Step1: User Feedback Analysis: Gather feedback from users on your MVP. Identify recurring themes, pain points, and areas for improvement. Step:2: Define Vision: Craft a clear vision for your product based on user needs and market trends Step3: Prioritise Features:Prioritise features based on user feedback, potential impact, and alignment with the product vision.. Step4: Create a Roadmap: Develop a roadmap that outlines the timeline for implementing features. Consider dependencies, technical feasibility, and resource constraints. Regularly review and refine your vision and roadmap based on real-world feedback and market dynamics.

Transitioning an MVP to its next stage means ensuring that the assumptions made with the launch of the MVP have been validated and the product is ready to move to its next phase. Ensure that sufficient feedback has been captured by users to understand how the MVP is being used and how it needs to change to move to its next phase. It is unlikely that the product will move from MVP to final stage. The best products are developed iteratively and will require many releases before reaching maturity.

EXPERIMENT BY PRETOTYPING like TESLA does… What is pretotyping? YOU FAKE IT BEFORE YOU MAKE IT ???. Check it out here … Pretotyping is a technique for testing hypotheses and validating ideas quickly and cheap, founded by Savoia. It involves creating a simplified version of a product or service to collect user feedback and understand market demand. It’s a non-working prototype. Pretotyping reduces the risk of failure by assessing market response early in the development process. A famous pretotyping story is how Tesla ‘faked’ their first electrical car, the Roadster, using a so-called ‘glider’ of a Lotus Elise to confront their potential customers with a ‘real car’, leading to 250+ launching customers who paid $ 5000,- in advance.

Validating assumptions and seeking feedback are foundational steps in refining AI-driven solutions, particularly in the nuanced field of advanced wound care. Assumptions, when unchecked, can lead to misaligned product development or missed opportunities. Regular validation and embracing user feedback help in aligning the technology more closely with the real-world clinical scenarios. As AI continues to permeate wound care, this iterative approach ensures the technology remains both robust and clinically relevant.

First thing first, is to set a clear hypotheses based on the assumptions. e.g if I assumed users want a specific feature, my hypothesis could be, "adding this feature will increase user engagement." Then gather data through user research, surveys, interviews, analytics, or usability testing. This data will help me understand whether my assumptions are correct and if the feedback aligned with user needs then i move on to measure and analyze using quantitative and qualitative methods to measure the impact of changes or features based on feedback and assumptions. Track key metrics like user engagement, conversion rates, or user satisfaction.

Iterating and improving a product is an ongoing journey, especially for AI-driven tools in advanced wound care. AI models benefit immensely from continuous feedback loops, where data from real-world usage fine-tunes its accuracy and relevance. With every iteration, not only does the AI become more precise, but the product also evolves to be more user-friendly and contextually adapted to the dynamic landscape of wound care. This iterative process is pivotal to ensure longevity, relevance, and clinical efficacy of the technology in patient care.

“Iterate until it’s awesome” is one slogan I’ve found especially helpful when developing an MVP to a full product. A product cannot be said to have been fully developed if you’re not iterating and improving on it continuously. When you iterate, you give room for customer feedback which in turn will lead to greater product adoption by users because you are iterating your products based on their feedback and what they want from your product.

Here, We have experience using technical readiness levels to steadily improve the product from a pretotype to a minimum viable product and then to a product ready for series development. The customised TRLs we defined start at TRL 1 where only a concept exists to TRL5 in the middle where we have an offline POC with no real time integration and finally TRL9 where there is a MVP validated in the vehicle with the industrialization approach finalised and ready for series development. There are also TRLs with clear delivery expectations in between. This approach helps in steady development of a product with chances to modify and course correct in case of changing requirements.

To make iterative improvements to address user feedback and enhance the MVP's features and functionality. Fix any issues, enhance features, and add new functionalities based on user needs and preferences.

Not always what customer says they want are actually driving them for the purchasing decisions. Therefore, achieving trade off betwee customer feedback and not wasting too much time-cost-efforts on iterations will be pivotal moment in Product Development. Solution is fix the decision criteria based on priorities and go to market with that and then figure out the product market fit.

In my experience scaling your product has to answer three fundamental questions 1. What needs to change in my MVP to be able to support a 10x user base. For eg. In it's early days Uber used to verify all its drivers manually but that couldn't be a solution if they had to verify 10x users. 2. What needs to change in my MVP to reduce my variable cost. For eg your MVP uses a 3rd party product to do some tasks which charges you per user. You will have to replace it with an in-house solution or negotiate a contract which doesn't charge you per user. 3. What needs to change in my product to acquire 10x users.eg. Your MVP is purely based on performance marketing, you will have to evolve your product to acquire users through organic channels

Perhaps obvious but not always actioned or understood is the upfront agreement of budgets required to be able to fund the scaling of the product (which may require additional headcount, localisation, a new operating model, promotional activities etc). There are few things more depressing than having a promising MVP, pilot or soft launch unable to fulfil its potential because budgets and the resulting benefits weren’t agreed upfront.

Scaling and growing a product, particularly in the realm of AI-driven wound care, is not just about reaching more users but ensuring consistent quality and effectiveness as you expand. It involves adapting to varied clinical environments, integrating with diverse health systems, and being responsive to the unique needs of different patient demographics. As AI technologies in wound care are adopted more broadly, it's imperative to invest in continuous training of the AI models, robust infrastructure to handle increased data, and cultivating partnerships to ensure holistic growth while retaining the core promise of improved patient outcomes.

A simple and impactful approach - - Define your vision - An achievable roadmap keeping in mind the vision - Break this roadmap into small iterations - Build and release smaller iterations that are measurable - Measure these releases and analyze what is good and bad - Listen to your users/customers, take feedback, and surveys - Use feedback and refine your next iteration that is from your roadmap so that your next iteration is making more impact - Repeat till you have a full product And continue this process but don;t forget your vision.

It's vital to avoid the temptation of adding too many bells and whistles. It can confuse users and stray from your product's original mission. A common mistake is packing your product with loads of features, making it bulky and losing sight of what made it cool initially. Keep the innovation focused with UX at the forefront - never lose sight of the core functionality that your users loved in the first place. As you innovate, always question ask yourself the question: "Does this enhance our core offering without complicating it?" This way, your product can evolve and grow without imploding.

We find the best method for product evolution often comes from customer/user feedback and taking a look at how they are using your product. Feedback answers what customers love/dislike about the product. This can help you add features or maybe even start sunsetting in favor of a different product. Seeing how your product is being used can spur ideas about feature adds, bundling ideas, and or new adjecent products. For example if you find your product is frequently used with another product or mostly used when x happens then you have data that can lead you to your next evolution and or innovation.

Once you find Product-Market Fit for a given segment a clear North Star should emerge. For companies like Slack that could be Daily Active Users (DAUs) or messages sent. Having a North Star will then allow you to filter your Roadmap through it against your Product Vision and Product Strategy. This will create a baseline so you can run experiments, A/B tests, "bets", and more, to see what impact your North Star, driving your Product forward.

First, gather user feedback from the MVP and identify essential features and improvements. Next, prioritize and plan these enhancements, creating a product roadmap. Allocate resources and develop the missing features, ensuring quality testing throughout. Launch the improved product and continue gathering feedback for iterative updates. Focus on marketing, scaling, and long-term support to transform your MVP into a successful full product.

DON'T REPLACE THE ENGINE OF A MOVING CAR at 100 MPH! It is really important that while moving from MVP to a full product, we look at all the components and the architecture really carefully. Is it the right programming language, the right database, the right cloud provider? Because changing anything henceforth is like changing the engine of a moving car 100 MPH! Also clear all the tech debt that you have accumulated so far! Or atleast attempt to clear it as much as possible. It is also really important to create modularity in the architecture and space for experimentation in the product road map. Else the product will start becoming stale and outdated as you go along. And most importantly have fun! What you are building is special!

It's also important to think holistically across the entire product life cycle. To do this we need to be aware of the market around you and monitor your product performance and market fit over time. There will be times to sunset a product, overhaul with new technology, or simply turn it off in favor of something different.

It’s important to not be afraid to pull back and go back to the drawing board as many times needed if the MVP is not meeting the expectations. No matter the pressure on launching is key to be able to abstract from the passion and urgency, to make sure your product can scale with quality.

The core of this transition is an increased focus on stability. When you’re confident in the MVP you’re already at a “full product” - but now you need to learn and iterate on it while remaining stable and consistent to users. You’re now in both maintenance and development mode. You know the product needs more to really deliver the value in your vision - but you can’t slide back from what you’ve already got. As a PM you’re now taking in more information from real usage to prioritize new features, improve the existing product, and iterate on the roadmap itself as you learn.