Up to 80% of the new products fail in the technology industry. In today’s technology & experience-driven Darwinian digital era, speed is one of the predominant factors that draw a line between digital predators and digital prey. To outsmart the competition, savvy businesses need to be first to the market with new but effective products and services. Therefore, businesses must rethink their processes for designing, building, and growing new digital products to cut down the design cycle time and time to market. Businesses need to move with the shifting paradigm — moving away from slow legacy approaches to digital product development. There are a number of approaches that any business can adopt to validate their products and services for secure, faster, and successful delivery. One such proven approach to improve your digital product’s speed to market and odds of success is adopting the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Development methodology.

What is

MVP Development? Agile has been a part of software development methodology and mainstream thinking for quite a while. Still, its importance and application to the business strategy came into limelight with the instigation and popularization of the Lean Startup movement by Steve Blank and Eris Ries. The idea was to start small with a bare-bones design and then tested on the market to analyze the products’ potential to succeed. Minimum Viable Product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort. Eris Ries A minimum viable product is a product built and launched with minimum investment and enough features (which may be just a landing page) to attract the eyeballs of early-adopter customers with a single aim — to validate the product idea and get feedback early in the software development life cycle.

5 Ms: MVP Product

Development Benefits In the digital economy, businesses that have the potential to deliver high-value products the fastest, survive, and thrive — Speed is supreme. However, delivering a new product that delights your customers demands a transformation — elimination of waste and embracing processes that could accelerate product delivery. Delivering a product better and faster at the same time, demands a different way of thinking — a lean MVP way of thinking. The MVP approach focuses on the ideology of a lean startup, implying a product built with a minimal budget in a given time. 1. More Focus on Building the Core Rather than coming up with a feature-heavy product, offering the core set of features help businesses to verify their product concept — whether it resonates with their target audience or not.

2. Meteoric (Speedy) Product Development Speedy means designing, building, and releasing the basic application quickly, iterating fastly, and validating along the way.

3. Market Validation MVP software development is all about testing and analyzing what works and what does not. The purpose of an MVP is to get acquainted with the market demand and sell that product to customers that they will love. What if we found ourselves building something that nobody wanted? In that case what did it matter if we did it on time and on budget? Eric Ries

4. Minimizing the Product Development Cost An MVP approach helps avoid mediocre end-user satisfaction, schedule slippage, and cost overruns by not letting you spend your entire production budget on all the features right away.

5. More Feedback = Improved Product A feedback from the right audience at the early stage of product development helps to design a better customer experience, which drives continuous improvement.

How to Build an MVP in

S.I.M.P.L.E. Steps? The MVP development process is a top-down, iterative, and test-driven approach that focuses on the customer at every stage of the MVP process. The purpose of a minimum viable product is a quick release, quick iteration, and continuous validation to make the final product launch easier and successful at the later stage. Understanding the MVP development process and steps involved in it is vital to its and product’s success. The following are the necessary S.I.M.P.L.E. steps required to build an MVP. 1. Start with Market Research I have an idea, bingo. Alas, not all ideas are worth bringing to the market — maybe your idea does not fit the customers and market needs. To evaluate, it is vital to set up market research and conduct surveys to gain more insights before embarking upon an MVP Development process. 42% of startups failed because their idea had no market need.

2. Ideate on Value Addition You cannot sell an MVP of an air conditioner in Antarctica. No matter how good your idea is, it will fail if you are unable to answer the following questions: What value does your idea add to its target user base? How could your idea benefit them? What will make them buy your idea? Beautiful product development in an ugly market segment simply makes no sense. Dan Adams

3. Map Out User Flow It’s almost impossible to build a car without referring to its visual design. Impatiently jumping to the MVP development process without highlighting the design and user flow leads to a ‘Failed MVP.’ Keep the future product and target audience in mind to design a user flow, which is convenient for users. Remember:

Design Thinking + Lean UX + Agile = Successful MVP

4. Prioritize MVP Features List down all the features (major & minor) that you want in your product before building the minimum viable product. While shortlisting the features, follow the MoSCoW approach. M — Must have features S — Should have features C — Could have features W — Won’t need features

5. Launch MVP Once you have gained insights into the market needs and have shortlisted the features based upon the MoSCoW approach to MVP, start building your MVP. While the ‘launch & build’ process of an MVP, remember that although it is not a final product, it should be built with top-most quality that fulfills your customer’s needs. Customer needs may vary, but their bias for quality never does. J. Willard Marriott

6. Exercise ‘B.M.L.’ — Build, Measure, Learn The Build-Measure-Learn (B.M.L.) is one of the most important steps of building an MVP. It deals with measuring the acceptance of the built MVP and its enhancement as needed. Based on the customer need hypothesis, keep iterating the product in relatively small increments. Note: Don’t be embarrassed by your first MVPs’ results. As Reid Hoffman said, “If you are not embarrassed by your first product, you launched too late.” It often takes 3-4 MVPs, with regular iterations, before the product is set for full deployment. Step by Step Guide to Build a MVP