Congratulations: you have a brilliant new idea. Whether it’s a new app, software, or physical product, it’s innovative — game-changing, even! You can’t wait to see it come to life. But where do you start? How do you take your idea from just a concept to a tangible product that people will use and love?
Time to put your MVP into the game.
What is an MVP?
Put simply, an MVP (aka Minimum Viable Product) is the most basic possible version of your product that still solves a core issue for your audience. Perfection is not the goal here — instead, you’re building a tool to collect the maximum amount of information about your product and your customers with the least amount of effort.
Test your idea: Building an MVP gets your tech out of your brain and into the real world with real users. Instead of spending months (or years) developing a full-featured product only to find out that nobody wants it, an MVP helps validate your idea early.
Save time and $$: Building a fully-featured product is rarely cheap or easy! Adopting a lean startup mindset and launching an MVP can help you minimize risk, conserve your resources, and even secure more funding to further develop your idea.
Iterative development: MVPs are built with the understanding that they will evolve based on user feedback and market demand. This iterative approach allows you to continuously improve and refine your product, making it more valuable to your users with each iteration.
The Product Iteration Cycle
An MVP by itself is no good without a playbook. That’s where the product iteration cycle comes into play! The cycle begins with the generation of new ideas. This can come from anywhere – customer feedback, market research, or the creative minds of your team members.
Once you have an idea, it’s time to boil it down to just the features that are essential to solving the problem your product addresses. A design thinking approach can help you get in your user’s shoes and truly empathize with their needs and the problems they’re facing. Aim to build a basic version of the product that includes just enough of what they need — congratulations, that’s your MVP.
Now, it’s time to release it to your target audience and gather feedback! Find your early adopters and invite them to experience your MVP in exchange for their honest opinions. This feedback is key to understanding how users interact with your product — what they like, what they don’t like, and what features they want to see in the future.
Here’s where you iterate on your MVP. What worked? Where did things go wrong? How can you improve the user experience? Look for ways to refine existing features, new features to prioritize, and how changing market conditions might impact your initial assumptions.
These ideas bring you back to the top of the product iteration cycle, so it’s time to rinse and repeat! Gather more feedback, make improvements, release new versions, and don’t stop until your product is perfect (spoiler: that will never happen, so just keep trying!).
From Viable to Virtuous to Valuable
While MVPs excel in speed and efficiency, it’s important to recognize their limitations. Customers might misuse, misinterpret, or straight-up misunderstand your product. Your market sector might be moving so quickly that you feel pressure to release a fully-fledged version and bypass the MVP stage altogether. And even if you’re going for the minimum, developing and iterating on an MVP still requires time, effort, and resources, which may be limited for some teams or startups.
An MVP superpower, though, is taking negative feedback and transforming it into positive momentum. Seeing where your product fails, what parts of development bleed funding, and how users break your expectations can all be the rocket fuel for your idea.
Some recommend shifting MVPs out of the “move fast and break things” tech era and developing “minimum virtuous products” — i.e. emphasizing and incorporating ethical and sustainable considerations. This variant of the MVP moves beyond just functionality and usability, helping innovators stay sensitive to unintended consequences and social responsibility.
MVPs can be a key step in evolving your product from simply viable to truly valuable. Armed with an MVP mindset, you can test your ideas, gather feedback, and continuously iterate your offerings to create something truly remarkable.
Want to learn more? Check out these resources:
A Step-by-Step Guide to Build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
The Best Products Never End – Why Iteration is the Key to Creating Great Products
7 Benefits of Ethical Product Strategy
The Minimum Virtuous Product: Is the Move Fast & Break Things Era Behind Us?
How To Validate Your Minimum Viable Product – 21 Proven Strategies That Work