How to Plan a Minimum Viable Product: a Step-By-Step Guide

Have an excellent business idea but don't know what to do next? Developing a new product is always closely related to the risks of failure. But you should definitely take the responsibility for at least a minimum part of its implementation. 

The best path here is to create an MVP and test your idea with the least possible effort and cost. This way you can indeed validate your valuable idea and define whether it is worth working on further. In case of failure, you will be relieved that it happened early with the least investments and in the case of success, with certain feedback, you will get insights on how to make your idea even better.

Let's see how the whole MVP development process goes in detail!

What Is a Minimum Viable Product?

A minimum viable product (MVP) is the smallest version of a product that has only basic features demonstrating the product's core idea be it a website or an application. This software development approach helps to test initial assumptions about the product and receive the reactions of the target audience. 

After the MVP development, you have a better understanding of the future budget, additional features, and product design required for further app development. Overall, MVP development can be performed in iterations when a set of issues is identified and the corresponding functionality is allocated to be developed. And the number of these iterations can be continuously large.

Why MVP Is Important

The benefits of MVP development are quite obvious:

• launch a product fast,
• invest the least costs into the product initially,
• improve idea with each product development iteration,
• get to know your target audience,
• receive early feedback about the product,
• show the business potential,
• attract investments for future product development.

MVP development forms the desired balance between your business offer and your audience’s needs. You can test hypotheses with minimum risks.

7 Steps To Plan A Minimum Viable Product Development

The main purpose of the minimum viable product is to show the most value with the least effort and app development costs involved. But before you go with the actual app development stage first you should make preparations.

#1. Make the Market Research

Find out whether your idea has already been developed in some form. Consider what problem it solves and is there a demand among people. Think about the ways to better understand what your potential audience may appreciate in your product and how you can best align it with their interests. 

#2. Define the Target Audience

You can conduct paid surveys to create buyer personas:

• their age
• gender
• specialty
• behavior
• interests
• challenges

The more detailed portraits you allocate, the better understanding you have about the way to satisfy their needs. Of course, those are fictional characters that best illustrate your real customers with certain peculiarities. By understanding their pain points you get a vision on how to help them and this way build customer loyalty.

#3. Analyze Competitors

Get an understanding of who your competitors are, what they offer, how your product can stand out in this crowd. Your product can benefit from offering solutions to existing problems in the competitors’ flaws.

Take the most successful competitors and define their strong and weak sides. Analyze their approaches in product development and sales efforts. Find out their market share and analyze other business indicators like user base, financial model, revenue growth or decrease, etc. The more you know about your competitors, the fewer errors you can make and the more benefits gained.

#4. Map Out the Customer Journey

Think about each step your potential customer does on the way to utilizing your product. What kind of information do your clients have about your product and whether it is enough for them to take the next step. Each of their actions can greatly depend on the product's type. Ask yourself honestly, would you buy such a product if you had that much information.

#5. Make a List of Priority Features

Define the whole list of functionality that you believe best suits your app. Then allocate only the most valuable ones that can not be excluded as it may ruin the whole product idea. Even if you can't take all the functionality in the first version of your product, if everything goes right, you will be able to add some more functionality within the next iterations.

Make sure the core functionality reflects the specified user flow and do not overload your MVP with fancy design. Put an emphasis on the value rather than form.

The core feature should precisely solve the problems your target audience faces.

#6. Develop an MVP

Once all the preparations are over and you have a clear vision of what your MVP will look like and most importantly how it should function, it is time to create a minimum viable product.

Read also: Prototype vs MVP: What Is the Best Choice for Your Project?

The user experience should be pleasant, design may look simple but enjoyable from starters. Implement the main features and decide on the functionality to be included in the next version over time. Make sure the product is of high quality possible at the current stage.

#7. Evaluate Feedback

When your MVP is finished and launched on the market, it is time to gather users' feedback. Make sure they correctly understand your initial message. See how customers use the product, make assumptions about why you may get controversial reviews, or ask directly about their experience. Make sure to analyze the outcomes. Discuss with the product development team how you can solve the emerging issues.

After you receive the whole spectrum of user reviews, make a list of the necessary corrections, consider the feasibility of their implementation and define the feature set for the second product development iteration. 

Application MVP Examples

There are many examples among famous companies that started with an MVP.

• Airbnb was founded by a few friends who, having a desire to start their own business but no money, offered extra space in their apartment for rent within a design conference in town. 

• Buffer app was initially a website with the services and subscription plans description that lacked the possibility to buy. It helped the founder to test the demand for an idea before developing the product.

There are lots of other examples that started from a simple solution that eventually grew into an extremely popular brand like Twitter, Amazon, Facebook, etc.

Having enough professional support from an app development company any idea can be turned into a valuable and extremely popular product.

Just recently, our app development team had assisted a client to build an MVP of a truly innovative idea in the luxury watches industry. The core functionality represents the possibility to track the authenticity of the watch’s parts after its repair by watch owners and initial producers. The developed lightweight version of an application is aimed at showcasing the app idea to potential investors in order to gather funds for further app development. See how we have developed an MVP for this purpose.

Next Steps After MVP Development

Developing an MVP is just an intermediate point in the whole product development process including development, testing, improvement, and support stages.

However, MVP development opens new possibilities to more successful product development.

After MVP release and feedback gathering, you can understand the clients’ needs better and improve the user experience more efficiently. Further developments of unimaginable features can be witnessed over time.

Conclusions

Now you know what is a minimum viable product, why you should consider developing an MVP, what benefits it may bring to your business, and how to actually perform the MVP development for your software product step by step.

When you decide to create an MVP, you make an important investment into your future digital product success by fast launch-to-market, quick acquaintance with the target audience, and flexible product adoption to the users’ needs. Additionally, this approach has proved to be cost-effective.

If you wish to go deeper into the topic and dive into your MVP development process, simply contact our experts!