Is your MVP Worth the Investment? 4 Questions to Ask Before You Build
With the rise of the lean startup movement and popularity of Minimum Viable Product (MVP) development, innumerable budding startup owners have flocked to development companies with their ideas, attracted by the prospect of getting maximum validation of their ideas out of minimal investment and effort.
However, having worked with startups on MVP versions of their products, a sticky situation we often find ourselves in is that product owners are often keen to get their idea materialised but have one of the following issues:
They’ve often already come to us with a specific solution to a problem in mind, without any concrete user or market research.
Their ideas aren’t solving the right problem for their target users.
The proposed solutions aren’t technically feasible.
The suggested scope of their MVP fails to provide any real value to their target users.
As much as MVPs are a much more economic way of getting customer feedback early or ‘failing early’, we all know development is still not cheap, so you want to make sure your investment is truly worth it.
So what are some ways you can make sure your MVP idea is worth investing in? We suggest 4 steps you should take before you get anything built.
Am I solving the right problem for my target users?
Naturally, this comes with the assumption that you have spent some time identifying just who your target audience is and what need/pain point your product is aiming to address. We’ve addressed this in our previous article 6 Steps to Developing an MVP (Minimum Viable Product). If your answer is ‘yes’ to the question, one further question you might want to answer is ‘how do I know this?’ We often bring many assumptions to the table with our product ideas, without carrying out any real user research to see if our assumptions hold true. Before you spend the money investing in an MVP, spend the time carrying out some user/market research (think surveys, explorative assessments etc.) to make sure that the idea that seems super brilliant to you and your colleagues is actually useful to the users too.
Is my MVP something of value?
We couldn’t agree more with this quote from a blog article written by Ward Andrews:
Perhaps the problem is that MVP was defined incorrectly in the first place. Instead of a “Minimum Viable Product,” we believe in the “Minimum Valuable Product:” one that has the fewest features necessary to solve the primary problem for your primary market.
This perhaps is an extension of the first question, but it also relates more specifically to the scope of your MVP. Yes, it’s true that the idea of an MVP is to build a lean product with minimal features to validate/invalidate your assumptions. However, if the feature set that you’ve defined for your MVP are too minimal (either because of restricted budget or time constraints), then you may be building an MVP that doesn’t deliver on what it promises to do. Even if you need to spend a bit more time gathering the necessary resources, ensure that the scope of your features do enough to show that your product solves the primary problem for your target market.
Have I prioritised my features carefully?
This again continues on from the previous question. We included in our previous blog article some questions you should ask when choosing key features:
What are the smallest number of core features that demonstrate the value of the product?
What are some lower priority features that can be included in the later release?
Make sure that you keep your primary pain point and key solution as the North Star when choosing these features. This will ensure you don’t backlog what’s truly necessary and you don’t include what’s secondary.
Am I spending too long on this?
As we said, the whole point of an MVP is to get feedback quickly and fail early if necessary. But, lest you find yourself wallowing in a bottomless pit of pivoting and iteration (be it features or product direction) in response to user feedback, seriously consider constraining the timeline of your product release. Remember, all the time you’re not on the market is money lost on product discovery and development.
We suggest that this Product Thinking guide be a helpful tool for answering these questions.
Having said this, we know it’s often hard to be objective when answering these questions. That why we’re here to be involved in your product development process earlier. At Olive Link, our team of business and technology experts do not just offer our tailored MVP Development services, but also offer business consulting services to ensure that you’re not just building a great product, but the right product.
If you’re keen to have a helping hand answer these questions before you invest in an MVP, contact us today, and one of our friendly experts will be in touch to help you on your journey.