What Happens After the MVP?

Maybe your project could benefit from a “release map.”

Written together with Shanfan Huang, Pivotal Labs Product Designer.

On our last project at Pivotal Labs in Boston, we released the MVP/SVP of our iPhone app in 38 work days. We were happy, but in the days leading up to the launch, our product team felt subtly stalled.

We had spent so much time trying to get to that first release — so much time defining the the bare-bones SVP that would begin the influx of real user feedback. But now that this SVP was almost live, what was the next right thing to build?

As Product Managers and Product Designers, it’s our job to make sure we’re building the right thing, and that we’re building the right part of it now. After six weeks of laser focus on the SVP, we struggled to know the next right thing to do.

Roadmaps are a somewhat controversial topic amongst practitioners of agile; they have their advantages and disadvantages. While they can help communicate a longer term vision of a product, they don’t always help to answer the question, “what do we do today? And why?”

We returned to the basics, to Eric Ries’s “Build, Measure, Learn” loop. To answer the questions of what to build next, we should first ask “what do we want to learn?” and then “what can we measure?” Only then should we ask, “so then what should we build?”

We wanted something physical we could keep in our team space, something we could tweak daily and use to organize our thinking. Starting from the whiteboard, we eventually iterated to this physical artifact, the “release map:”