What is an MVP?

Imagine you come up with a winning global product idea. You can’t launch a rich, mature product on Day 1 to all segments; partly because you don’t want to risk the time and the resources to deliver every feature right away, but also because some features take time to gain customer acceptance. The minimum viable product (MVP), helps product managers deliver products faster to market with less risk.

MVPs…

• …increase speed to market and generate revenue sooner.
• …reduce risk with a test-and-learn approach.
• …are market and persona-focused.

A minimum viable product is a product with just enough features to satisfy early customers and to provide feedback for future product development. To be clear, we define the MVP as a live product that can bring in revenue because your target group of customers see enough value in the product to pay for it. An MVP is not the finished version, it is an early iteration of your final product that appeals to a small sub-set of your market. An MVP approach must be supported by rapid iterations and improvements to give your customers confidence that you are working towards a much richer, more mature version. It’s also a great way to de-risk - building the complete product takes a long time and is resource-hungry, expensive and high risk. Therefore, rather than trying to be all things to all segments at the outset, the MVP approach to help prioritize a development roadmap.

Essentially, the MVP approach helps you to:

·       Identify the addressable markets.

·       Identify and prioritize segments.

·       Identify and prioritize personas in that segment.

·       Identify and prioritize user stories for our personas.

Careful prioritisation means you can manage the capacity of your development team while still meeting the needs of your customers.

Finding the MVP

The start point for the MVP isn’t the product, but the markets. Start by listing the markets that the product could serve and then prioritize them. The most attractive market is likely to have more desire or pain around the problem your product solves.

Then prioritise your personas in that primary market, and then prioritise features for that primary persona. This gives a much more focused MVP. The attribute maps helps visualise this.

Building out the road map

Now you have identified your initial product offer you review your second priority persona and ask the question “What additional features need to be developed to gain product acceptance with this group?” Repeat this with lower value personas to build out the attribute map, giving you a view of what you need to initially deliver and how you can increase the reach and value of the product with incremental stories being added along the way.