A minimum viable product, or MVP, is a product with enough features to attract early-adopter customers and validate a product idea early in the product development cycle. In industries such as software, the MVP can help the product team receive user feedback as quickly as possible to iterate and improve the product.
Because the agile methodology is built on validating and iterating products based on user input, the MVP plays a central role in agile development.
If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late”
Reid Hoffman
Why MVP?
MVP is Minimum Viable Product, where we build the mini-version of our (visioned) product
- It is faster to build
- We could get feedbacks much earlier
- It helps (in)validating our hypothesis / assumption
Example of MVP?
Some examples:
- Airbnb: Brian and Joe took a few pictures of their loft, created a simple web page and soon enough had 3 paying guests.
- Tokopedia: Selling game voucher using google form
- Bukalapak: Sending “manual” SMS reminder to all users not paying their transactions yet
What is not MVP?
- Mockup.
- Landing page (this might be useful, but this is NOT MVP!).
- Minimum product but not viable.
- Prototyping and beta users.
Challenges of MVP
- Delivering of only the minimum value of it, without the viability one
- It has to have a goal from the very beginning, to know whether we should keep improving or let it go.
- The desire to not “transform” MVP into full viable product.
Doing an Experimentation
Planning
Start with why!
(Putting it here to make an element of continuity from previous presentation)
Create your hypothesis
“Our add to cart rate is just 5%,
adding some features might increase it to 15%”
Develop
It’s all about Testing
Historical : Previously, we don’t have a feature. Then we add it, what’s the difference?
On / Off : We have the capabilities of turning on / off some of the features.
Multivariate (AB) : We run several variants of a feature (could be as simple as text, color or as complex as flow).
Monitoring
- Put the trackers
- Measure the change of goals
- Monitor other metrics
- Run at least a week
- (if possible) Run even after decided
Beware of novelty effect!
Beware of too good or too bad results!
