An 8-Step Approach to Help You Define a Real MVP From a problem to a well-defined MVP in 8 steps: understand the problem, your users, the market and your competitors; define your ‘complete product’ as a backlog of product features; assess your features, rank them and select the smaller set that can bring enough value to your early customers; so they are happy enough to stay engaged and promote your product. 1. Frame the problem One of the most important steps in the product development process — is the . It is a good idea to , to help you with clarity. understanding and proper articulation of the problem use a model a structure formulate the problem Start by describing versus , and by this gap the ideal situation the current one how certain users are impacted Support your problem statement with — for example figures to describe the or the . Keep it simple and clear- a structured, well-understood articulation of the problem with no technicalities and fancy terms. statistics and facts size of the problem potential of the opportunity should become part of your ‘ ’: your team, your investors, your sponsors and other stakeholders should all be able to instantly understand it and reference it when reviewing your solutions and product plans. The problem statement common corporate language 2. Identify your users Make sure you know who you are solving for! Identify and the different classes of users in the context of your problem; document their needs and the problems they are experiencing; identify their pain points; their expectations, and the best-possible experience they could have in this context. name Define Success criteria for each class of users. 3. Understand your users your users is different from your users. You need to apply empathy, study your users and deeply understand their profiles, habits and needs. You could use existing research and public domain insights; or host user interviews and focus groups — to validate both your problem statement and your potential solution. Identifying understanding 4. Validate the problem Having your problem defined with clarity, allows you to validate it with your key stakeholders — including your customers or end-users: challenge the problem and make sure it is ; study the impacted users and document how they are affected by this problem. During this process, try to answer the following questions: worth-solving Do users know any to the problem? potential solutions Is this the most significant problem they are facing– in this context? Are there any workarounds they are using? How would their situation improve if there was a good solution? Would they pay for such a solution? At this point, you must also scan the market and the state-of-the-art to figure out if there are existing products or services — addressing the same problem; and if so, it is critical to understand how. Startups and the Importance of Agile Product Development 5. Ideate and draft potential solutions Having a and problem, enables you ideate and explore potential solutions. At this stage, I would recommend starting by setting the context — make sure your team is aligned and has a deep, shared understanding of the problem space — the situation, the ideal state, the users, the personas; the pain points and the opportunity. well-defined validated Then, move on to an ideation phase — you need ideas on how to solve the problem and provide value to your customers. Ideation could take the form of a series of brainstorming sessions, or or internal contests like . design sprints hackathons Whatever the form or methods you select, make sure your team is capturing all of the ideas, into a system. This is important to allow fast iterations over this set of ideas, and post-processing: you will have to evaluate each idea and attach metadata and artifacts as you go. Depending on the scale of your initiative, could add significant value by organizing and speeding up the entire process. an ideation system Assuming a set of great ideas and potential solutions is there, iterate through the following steps: based on their and . (this will allow ideas to and be reconsidered under different circumstances in the future). Prioritization will allow you to pick the most promising ideas, using not just opinions but a standardized ‘idea assessment framework’. Review all your abstract ideas and prioritize them potential feasibility Do not discard ideas; assign priorities instead stay active as necessary — merge or group them — to draft an overall solution or Combine ideas product definition ; make sure that has the integrity required to call it a ‘product’ Iterate and refine the product draft — and define a long-term product road-map Start Small but Think Big — and how you are going to validate them State your assumptions 6. Define your ‘ full Product’ The in the MVP implies that you already have the , the A common mistake is when the team ‘easily’ identifies a set of ‘obvious’ use cases as the MVP — without a clear product vision and a good definition of the ‘complete product’. Minimum Big Picture product vision! Assuming you have this bold , the next step is to define your ‘complete product’ as a long list of User Stories — your product backlog. It is important to understand here, that this is the / not just your MVP! product vision full version of your product Another important point is that ; my advice is to describe everything — even the most crazy and expensive product features, as you will be able to prioritize and manage them at a later stage. you don’t have to apply feasibility, cost or other constraints at this stage This way, you don’t have to skip, drop or archive an idea for a feature that looks ‘ahead of its time’ or not well-understood yet. Instead, you should include them in your backlog with a lower priority — but they will still remain discoverable and potentially useful in the right context. more user stories, until your product is described in full .Your ‘full product’ backlog should have all the features you can think of, reflecting the needs of all users identified so far; and all in the form of solid user stories. Iterate and keep defining 7. Define your MVP — the Minimum Viable Product A this point you have the definition of your ‘full product’ — the not the . What you need now, is a process to find the from the complete minimum best minimum subset of features complete product backlog. This ‘ ’ which delivers enough value to your early customers to keep them happy and engaged, is what the MVP is all about: the first instance of your real product, which will help you to , with and . best minimum subset of features go to market faster minimum implementation costs the right feedback loops enabled To find this minimum subset, analyse carefully each User Story — in terms of , the and also in terms of cost and feasibility. This way, (a number — ideally as a function of the expected value and feasibility). value to the user importance in solving the problem all user stories in your product backlog will get a priority Next step is to , with the highest priority at the top; then, you have to apply and to draw the red-line which will define the top-n stories as the basis for your MVP. rank the User Stories business product sense How to run a successful Design Sprint 8. Define how success would look like By now you have a great basis for building your MVP: you have a solid problem statement, deep understanding of your users, the market and the technology, along with a prioritized product backlog. Before you start implementing your product, it is a wise move to define specific Success Criteria — and how to track the involved figures. Identify the key metrics and the underlying data points; define and document the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) — which will reflect the performance of your product against time and other dimensions. Think of how your assumptions and hypotheses are linked to those metrics and KPIs. Setup a system to monitor these KPIs and how close they are to the pre-defined success. You will probably need a funnel to measure conversion rates and a special dashboard — as a single and reliable point of reference regarding the performance of your product. Next steps: Build, Measure, Learn; iterate The process described so far, will hopefully give you a well-defined MVP. You will know , and possibly and . what to build why, for whom when how But this is just one part of the story: to succeed you have to ‘ ’— you need an excellent as well. Follow modern agile engineering practices — ; always with the user in mind. make it happen MVP execution build, measure, learn and iterate fast Comments, suggestions and questions welcome! https://www.linkedin.com/in/gkrasadakis/ The Minimum Viable Product, explained. Related articles Startups and the Importance of Agile Product Development Rapid Prototyping practices for Software Engineering teams How to run a successful Design Sprint How to lead innovation and drive change in engineering teams How (and Why) to Write Great User Stories How to become a great Product Manager Is this a prototype or an MVP? Well actually, it’s a proof of concept. How to setup and lead a great product development team Technology Innovation — Trends and Opportunities in 2018 Cover image: pixabay

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