What is a Minimum Viable Product? - Essential Features and Guidelines

Although many startups already start building an MVP before launching a full product, most people still do it the wrong way. When developing a Minimum Viable Product, you don’t need to spend development time on many features.

You have only a few core features that will define your mobile app. In this article, we are going to provide you with some major benefits of shortened development time and explain why your company may want to look into MVP strategies.

What is an MVP?

Minimum Viable Product is the initial version of your mobile application that contains the main features needed to satisfy the user’s problems and provide feedback for the potential product development.

A Minimum Viable Product is not a beta version of your app, it’s a full version of a mobile app that can be used by real users. An MVP will also become a prototype for future development stages and define the subsequent steps for the full version  – whether that’s transforming the app entirely or continuing your development plan.

In some cases, the startups can use an MVP to showcase the potential of their business and attract the interest of investors. 

Why choose to develop an MVP for your business?

Building an MVP can be crucial for your business as it brings many benefits without much investing.

MVP is the best way to launch your app with the minimum amount of time and expenses.

Besides, it brings you the scope of benefits that’s hard to ignore. MVP development gives you such possibilities as:

• Checking if your product is interesting for potential users
• Creating a base of potential customers and find early adopters of your product
• Bringing the product time to market as fast as possible 
• Collecting real feedback from the users
• Reducing development costs
• Getting fast market change adoption
• Implementing frequent application updates
• Finding investors will be much easier with a ready-made MVP product.
  

How to speed up MVP development

To build MVP in the most effective and fast way, it’s necessary to follow these main guidelines:

• Conduct market research
• Clearly formulate the idea of the product and the hypothesis regarding its need for potential users
• Outline the criteria that determine the viability of the product
• Build and launch a Minimum Viable Product as quickly as possible to prove your hypothesis
• Collect, analyze and process feedback
• Calculate and evaluate key performance indicators
• Draw conclusions and proceed to test your product

There are main stages of MVP but there are some ways to speed up the process in each phase: 

1. You can use open-source libraries and plugins for creating components and UI kits of your product.
   
2. By establishing better communication in the team, you can get the solutions much faster. 
   
3. Creating MVP could be hard and stressful, so you can come up with some additional motivation for your team using all kinds of bonuses and team-building activities. 
   
4. Divide responsibilities carefully. Every team member should have his/her predefined tasks and timeframes. At the same time, all specialists need to be aware of each other’s responsibilities to avoid double-work.
   
5. Before the start of the development, make sure that all team members are on the same line regarding the product development stages. Discuss all details and potential risks in advance. 
   

How to define essential features for your MVP?

First of all, you need to extract the main value of your app. It’s the purpose of your idea, why do you want to create it in the first place. 

The second step is to choose which features are not only valuable for your mobile application but essential. From the very beginning, it could seem like you need absolutely every feature for your app, and this is ok. But when you are thinking about the features that have to go into your MVP mobile app for sure, ask yourself “Will my app work and save the basic idea?” That can help to define which features to include in future versions of the product.

To select the vital functionality, carefully analyze each User Story, keeping in mind the value of the features to the user, the importance of solving this problem, as well as the cost and feasibility of the solution. Thus, all User Stories in your product backlog will receive a certain priority (ideally, a number depending on how important this function is to the user and how easy it is to implement it).

The next step is to arrange User Stories in order, with the highest priority features on top. Top User Stories will form the backbone of your MVP. Where exactly the red line separating these most important User Stories will depend on the requirements of the business and on the specifics of the product.

Whether your project is at the initiation or the execution stage, a truly professional team can meet your needs. Moreover, we they help you with choosing your tech stack and validate your business idea. If you doubt about the business prospects of your app, they can provide you with IT consulting services. 

CALCULATE THE COST OF YOUR APP

The pricing should always be transparent and clear. That is why we developed a mobile application that helps you to understand an approximate cost and a timeline to develop your web or mobile product.

This free MyAppCost application includes different options, key features, and integrations your application could have. Choosing different types of applications, platforms, and even additional parameters, you will be able to see the approximate price and timeline for your app development, and what is included in it. 

Thank you for reading!

Also published at https://upplabs.com/expertise/mvp/