Minimum Viable Product
You got your 3 basic product hypotheses: goals, needs, and capabilities. You already set your mind on moving forward. Now it’s time to understand how you take product thinking and put it into action. Putting your theory through a reality check and improving your product theory time and again. It’s time to create a product.
Test yourself, now that you’re on the verge of starting to create your product — what do you want to make?
The first thing to remember when coming to answer this question is that you’re making a product to test your theory. This product needs to advance your goals, answer your users' needs, and keep your capabilities not stretched out too far. You also want to fail fast, It’s true that you should always think positively but by this time you already know that failing, in product thinking, is a good thing.
So now that we’ve revisited the reasons you’re building a product, the answer to this question becomes clear — You want to make the smallest, fastest product that would fail if your hypothesis is wrong, you should create a minimal viable product or MVP.
Taking this concept apart will help you understand it better before we get into an example. Starting from the end it is a product, in the matter that users can do something with it, this is most important since the goals of the MVP is to fail if the hypothesis is wrong. I want to stress that the fact that I call it a product doesn’t mean it needs to answer the users' needs if this is the hypothesis you want to test, it just needs to a product enough to show you if your hypothesis about your user’s needs has merits. An example to help you conceptualize it, you have a theory that creating biblical sandals with minimal soles (ie barefoot biblical sandals) would answer the need of the barefoot community. Your MVP could be to set a simple campaign targeting barefoot and minimalist shoe search terms or just posting in relevant Facebook groups. This would lead a website that would, at minimum, ask for the users’ emails or phone number and at most would charge them the amount you think is right for your new model, both would give you the opportunity to disprove your theory fast and cheap.
There can be many interpretations of the concept of a Viable product. The one most helpful is a product that users can do something to show their commitment with time or money. Your MVP should focus on the biggest question you have a the moment. If your MVP is built to test your capabilities then you should create it with the capabilities you want to use later on for the full product. It is important to understand that a good MVP would result in users investing something in it, either money, time, or other efforts that would be part of the wide range of activities they would do in the full product. The users need to do something that is measurable to show you that the MVP that you created with your capabilities is good enough for them. Let’s say you want to start a trail running group in your local community center, you have one afternoon a week to work on it, you should start your MVP by organizing one meeting. If with one afternoon you organize one meeting and people come then you have proven that one afternoon is enough to organize a meeting. Please notice you didn’t prove your theory, you just gained important information about your biggest question at the moment — is one afternoon enough.
The MVP doesn’t have to contribute to the end product, it doesn’t need to be part of the end product, it just needs to be the smallest thing you can create that will answer your biggest question.
What if the MVP succeeds? Good for you, you can continue working on your full product and while you develop it you can keep getting answers to the big questions that arise using more MVPs
What if the MVP fails? First of all move forward, this is just one question you didn’t get right the first time. I plan to have another post on that but the main thing you need to remember is that any failed MVP can either teach you that the MVP was not good or some parts of the product hypothesis is not good, whenever an MVP fails you need to be able to hypothesis why it failed and to create another MVP to test the new assumptions you gained from doing the first MVP
MVP is a very powerful tool but it’s a double-edged sword, in many cases, non-product thinkers do MVPs and keep them live without building on them, in most of these cases these non-product thinkers either did a too big MVP, didn’t have a specific question to answer or they didn’t understand that if their MVP is good as maybe it proves that the business goals need to change.
So, go build MVPs, it the most satisfying to you and the team the feeling of users already engaging with your new endeavor.
