The Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in Software Development
Technology entrepreneurs and start-up owners are excellent at spotting gaps in the market. With the aim of solving the problems that their target markets find; they develop the most innovative product concepts. Nonetheless, when they start working on developing their concepts into finished software applications, the difficulty often begins.?
Lack of funding is quoted frequently as the main reason why small businesses fail. Many startup entrepreneurs struggle to achieve their goals due to a shortage of funds and the pressure of launching a new software product to market. The different kinds of Minimum Viable products (MVP) could be valuable in this situation.?
While this is one of the characteristics and functions of software products, ideas can be great when they are just that: ideas, but they are difficult to implement in real life. One approach to getting those great ideas off the ground is to create a Minimum Viable Product.?
No one can guarantee that our Phone application will be successful once it is launched, but this does not mean that we do not have the tools to test, evaluate and comprehend our project before it is officially launched so we can optimize our chances of success.??
In these terms, one of the most testing tools in our hands as mobile app developers is an MVP, Minimum Viable Product. With an MVP, you can test your idea and the characteristics of its application to know how their audience reacts, how they experienced it and if the project can be improved before the launch and how.??
In this article, we are going to explore what MVP is and how you can use it to improve your project, and we are also going to analyze the development process of an MVP so you can understand how they can design and build your Minimum Viable Product.?
With the MVP, it is developing only the main functions of their product so it can become a species of basic model able to achieve the main objective that it is wished to achieve. If, for example, you want to launch an app that can solve a particular problem of their users, the MVP must provide this capacity, but it can be free of any additional characteristic or any element.??
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What is a Minimum Viable Product??
A Minimum Viable Product, or MVP (in software development) is a reduced version of the product you are developing, which has the minimum features, requirements and requirements for a software to be released to the market so that it can be tested to determine its acceptance, effectiveness, performance...?
The MVP software is essentially a test version of its product concept. While some may misunderstand that this means to create less efficient products, the concept of MVP in Software development refers to generating the most basic version of a Sofware product and use it as a test version. After that, the product can be tested, and the information obtained from the user input can be used to shape and materialize the customized software product into a more tangible and complete product.?
In our sector, technology engineering development, the MVP helps to validate whether the product idea is accepted by the users. By not having to develop the entire software system, the execution process is faster and less costly, checking whether the product is viable or not, at the beginning of the product development cycle.?
The MVP plays an important role in agile development, since the agile methodology is based on validation and iteration of products based on the user input.?
It has many advantages, the main one perhaps being that we do not burn the project’s budget on an unvalidated hypothesis. In many cases, many projects or startups focus on translating the idea of their founders to the last details and then, go to market. This entails delaying the time-to-market and leaves you with no room for manoeuvre if, your hypothesis, in the end is not aligned with the market, and you must make certain tweaks in the scope of the project. There is no money left for that and many companies or startups suffer or end up closing, even being close to what users need.??
Purpose of a Minimum Viable Product?
Why is it important to develop an MVP??
Eric Ries (entrepreneur and author of the popular Startup Lessons Learned blog), was the one who introduced the concept of minimum viable product as part of his Lean Startup methodology, describes the purpose of an MVP this way:???
"It is the version of a new product that allows a team to gather the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with less effort, and less cost management."???
Full development may involve some danger in the process of subsequent commercialization.?
In other words, the MVP in software development is focused on not developing a project or product to the last consequences, but investing fewer to get a working system, with less functionalities than it would have in its complete approach, but that allows to go to market or in a testing group.??
Its time to market is shortened by using an optimized MVP software development strategy. Therefore, it is essential (vitally important) to deploy a technology product as early as possible, and developing an MVP can be a key strategy.??
Eric Ries considers that the minimum viable product is one of the requirements for a start-up company to reduce risk; moreover, it allows improving a project with a high level of innovation.??
You should consider functionality, reliability, usability and design that delights your early adopters and not just focus on functionality, which is a common mistake.?
In general, an MVP helps you to:??
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In short: an MVP allows your company to validate a product without building the entire product. An MVP helps minimize the time and resources you might otherwise spend building an unsuccessful product.?
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Types of Minimum Viable Product?
The low fidelity minimum viable products are easy to develop, and they allow you to obtain basic results that help you to understand consumer needs. Their objective is to explore which type of solution would be the most effective for the clients.??
For instance, direct interviews with the clients are a good way to obtain information about the product and the problem that wants to be solved. It is a Minimum Viable Product that can be used to prove that the idea is profitable and scalable?
The high fidelity minimum viable products offer deeper results, and they require higher development. Their aim is to identify an efficient solution that defines if the clients are willing to pay and which could be the amount to lead; besides, they enable to define and optimize the marketing strategies in the value proposition and communication channels.?
These types of Minimum Viable Products require much more time and effort, but they are an effective way to prove whether you have a desirable product or service before building it completely, for example, with digital prototypes.?
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Benefits of developing a Minimum Viable Product??
Developing a Minimum Viable Product has numerous benefits. Here are some of them:?
Faster Launch: One of the key advantages of the MVP development is that it reduces the time it takes to produce a product. You can quickly create a basic, but fully functional product, allowing you to take advantage of the possibilities that arise in the fast-paced industry.?
Products that are useful: the focus is on building and refining the essential components of your product from the beginning. As a result, subconstruction, feature creep and rework time are eliminated.?
Space for development: Because MVP software development is incremental, it leaves more room for your product to adapt in response to changing demands. This is crucial, especially if you want your product to be future proof.?
Customer connections should be established sooner rather than later: this style of development allows your users to contribute to the overall structure of your website.?
It facilitates customer relationship building: The MVP allows your customers to contribute to the overall structure of your product from the beginning. The shape and structure of the entire product is determined by your ideas and interests.??
It is more profitable: instead of investing heavily in the development of a product whose viability has not yet been proven, MVP allows you to invest progressively in a product that reduces the possibility of failure. Besides, the investments are made on an as-needed basis, which makes them more profitable.??
Characteristics of a Minimum Viable Product?
Knowing the characteristics of the minimum viable product helps our product development teams not to waste resources on a product that is not wanted or needed. Some of the key features of an MVP are:??
The MVP has an appropriate design and thus achieves a user experience that delights. This is why it manages to satisfy the visual and interaction aspect.??
It has enough value that people are willing to use or buy it. In other words, it is useful to your target audience.???
An MVP's reliability means that early adopters can fully trust the solution and that it has a reputation, even if it was launched by a company with little time on the market.??
The minimum viable product has the necessary functions to solve a specific consumer issue. It meets the demands and allows to evaluate the functions to be implemented in advanced stages.?
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Basics you need to know to start a software development MVP??
Understanding the many types of MVPs before you start building a minimum viable product can help you make your idea more tangible. We highlight 5 categories of MVPs for technology product development:????
Single-feature MVP (simple-feature MVP)?
This methodology works by implementing one aspect of your product and testing it with people, as the name suggests.??
Development should focus on launching the most valuable/important feature of the product while following the single-feature MVP strategy. You should consider what could be the most valuable feature(s) that your target audience would focus on. In other words, you must develop the feature that you think can satisfy the demands/needs of the target audience the most.???
Since the creation of the core functionality can be resource-intensive, the single-function MVP is considered a high-fidelity type of MVP.??
For this strategy to be effective, you will need to decide which feature is essential to your technology product idea. The basic functionality of the product can usually be defined by adequately answering this question: For what fundamental purpose do you want the customers of your application to use it? Other features or other embellishments can be introduced as the user base of the product expands.??
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This concept has been implemented by several major companies around the world and has proven to be quite successful. Pokemon Go is an excellent example of a game that started with a single feature and grew once the test feature proved successful.??
MVP in parts????
This strategy involves reusing open source and/or common interface templates. The goal is to reduce the amount of time and money spent on developing your program. Once you have created a basic functional version of a product, you can consider upgrading it.??
The major shortcoming of this model is that it may not work if your market needs something distinctive. Essentially, giving up the originality of your code and the entire product is what this form of MVP entails.???
The Landing Page MVP (landing page MVP)??
This type of MVP focuses on increasing the number of followers and receiving user feedback. To test the viability of your product idea, a landing page MVP is implemented in addition to conventional research and marketing activities.???
You set up a simple website (hence the name) and evaluate how site visitors react to the content you publish. This offers a fantastic opportunity to advertise the product even before it is developed.??
The content presented in the landing communicates the idea and conceptual framework of the product to the users to gather their feedback without investing a lot of time and money. This MVP approach is perfect because it allows you to learn about your target customers' expectations and interests in your product while investing little resources in the early stages, making your software product future-proof.??
You can track user activity and interactions after creating engaging multimedia content. By observing the flow of user navigation within the landing you can determine which content is of most interest and from this you can deduce the needs of your target audience to guide the development strategy of your technology product.???
The MVP of the Wizard of Oz???
The "Wizard of Oz" mode aims to produce an illusion in the audience.???
Here most of the effort is focused on creating an impressive user interface that makes users feel comfortable and confident with the product, rather than investing time and resources in product development with complex back-end coding.???
The Flintstones MVP (Non-Product MVP)??
Flintstone MVP requires manually performing the tasks you want to automate if the product is accepted by the target audience. The non-product or non-code MVP is one of the low-fidelity variants. You can determine whether automation is useful and necessary to optimise your operations during testing time. However, this mode may require a significant commitment of time and money.??
Without developing the technology product, it also involves promoting the product and collecting data on consumer behaviour. Non-product MVP can take the form of conventional non-tech or low-tech approaches because there is no development involved, including presentations, structures and even some simple prototypes or demonstrations.?
Some examples of minimum viable products??
If you're wondering what this would look like in practice, let's review how a couple of familiar brands launched successful MVPs.??
Airbnb??
With little investment the founders of Airbnb developed their online business idea. They initially initiated the development of a web concept, published photos and other details about their property, and easily got contact from several guests who wanted to book their property almost immediately.???
Airbnb's online business idea began by solving a problem for founders Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia, who had moved to San Francisco and couldn't afford rent. With an extra room in their home, they thought maybe someone would be willing to pay to share it with them for a period of time. That was how the testing of this minimum viable product began.??
To begin with, Chesky and Gebbia focused their minimum viable product on people going to San Francisco for conferences and found their first customers in them. They then started with a first website that allowed them to show photos and information about what they were offering, which allowed them to get feedback from users and learn about their needs when travelling and looking for accommodation.?
Image from Fueled ?
Today, Airbnb's digital business concept no longer focuses solely on conferences or events, but encompasses much more, and is used by millions of hosts and guests around the world. It is an online business that adapts to the demands of its users.????
Groupon?
Groupon is a web platform that offers daily discounts and coupons from local and national shops. Before the birth of this business idea as we know it today, it was a platform called The Point, focused on bringing people together to solve their problems.
In an interview for Mixergy, Andrew Mason (ex-CEO and Co-Founder of Groupon) points out that it took him eleven months working on The Point to get everything ready. However, it didn't turn out as he had hoped. And it was after a lot of research and analysis that the idea of making a discount platform was born. Before developing a complete software, they launched a test of the service through a WordPress blog hosted on a subdomain (those were different times).???
Through the Groupon platform, they manually published the day's offers and followed up via email to those interested in the offer. Joe Harrow, head of customer service, spent more than three hours every afternoon personally communicating with customers via email once a Groupon purchase was closed.???
The initiative was a success: they found a market interested in coupons and discounts before developing a whole platform. They did not create anything new until they found that the public had a genuine interest in their business ideas.??
Buffer??
Buffer is a tool that allows you to manage social media accounts and schedule your posts.???
Joel Gascoigne, founder of Buffer, had been using Twitter for a while and noticed that his posts were gaining some popularity. This led him to post more, but there was a problem: it was time-consuming to do it manually and above all it required time availability to post regularly.???
It was then that he thought he could create a technological product that would allow him to schedule his tweets. He considered that he was not the only person dealing with this problem and decided to test whether people would like to use software for this purpose. So, he created a web domain of just two pages without even having the product.??
The first consisted only of three bullets with product features and a "Plans and Pricing" button. When they clicked on this link, they could gauge people's interest in their business idea. Buffer asked for an email address to notify interested parties when the product was ready.??
They then added a pricing table to determine what the ideal range was. This way they made a minimal investment with very low risk and resulted in a highly successful project.?
Dropbox??
This cross-platform digital hosting service started when its founders wanted to create a tool that would allow file sharing across devices.??
The question was: how to test the idea without having to spend a lot of money? Developing such a product meant a big investment in time and money. It was an idea that required a human factor, technical features superior to the competition and technical elements that, if tested and failed, could result in big losses.??
They found a way to demonstrate the benefits of their idea without devoting so many resources to it. How? They made a demonstration video explaining the benefits of Dropbox and published it on the internet. This confirmed their hypothesis that there were many users interested in the product. After that video, Dropbox took six months to be released.??
This is the original video Dropbox released to consolidate their MVP:?
Amazon??
This US e-commerce company started as a small online book shop run by Jeff Bezos. He initially bought books from distributors and shipped them to his customers every time his shop received a new order. Thanks to high sales, Jeff decided to add new products to his online shop and then became one of the retailers that has changed consumer habits.???
Bezos' vision was to build a massive e-store and books were the minimum viable product with which he started his business. This allowed him to get to know his customers and what they needed in order to offer them strategic products. This was the foundation of what is now the world's largest online retail platform.?
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Uber??
Uber started as a simple day for founders Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp after a snowstorm in Paris in December 2009. Experiencing the common urban problem of not getting a taxi at the time, the idea to create a new company called UberCab was born. The idea was to develop an app that would allow a person to find an affordable ride within minutes. The need was very clear and that made it easy to provide an efficient and optimal solution for customers.?
They started with a single car owned by Uber, and their founders and friends were the ones using the app. That's how they started testing this minimum viable product. If anyone else wanted to join, they had to send an email to the founders, who would provide them with an access code. The list of users started to grow so significantly that they had to add other drivers.?
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Summarising??
An MVP represents a simplified or skeleton version of the original software product concept. It often only includes a few crucial functionalities to design the application framework. These speeds up the release process of your product and helps with better financial management.??
The process of creating MVP software development can be approached in several ways. Business owners select the type of MVP that best suits their needs and skills. Let's look at four common types of MVPs, two low-fidelity and two high-fidelity, and their attributes.??
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Experts in MVP development??
At nazaries intelligenia we are experts in the development of minimum viable products. We have been developing MVPs for more than fifteen years for our clients, such as TestGorilla, Get Time, SEAVER, SIISCAPP, in addition to the creation of our own technological products (SaaS). Some of them are: Congressus, Intellitickets, Port Monitor, UniPrácticum, our IoT Platform, etc.?
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