Vast numbers of companies would try to tailor their solutions to the needs of potential clients by developing an MVP. With a pinch of luck and keeping in mind what are the definitive don'ts while using this concept – your product can become a great success!
What actually is a Minimum Viable Product?
MVP is a well-known approach to product construction and development. In short, the initial product should include basic functionalities that allow you to verify its value, collect feedback from the market and gain a much richer understanding and detailed vision regarding the future development.
One of the key advantages of the MVP approach is gaining the understanding of your customer – what they are interested in and what their realistic needs are. With MVP, you can get those valuable insights without exceeding the budget and developing the product fully – that will allow you to invest your funds in new features in a smart and more efficient way.
Well, as nice and easy as it sounds, there are some mistakes that can be made along the way. Continue reading to find out more about the most common mistakes while building MVPs.
Lack of market research
Before starting your journey with MVPs, there is one important thing to do – marketplace research. Conclude a deeper analysis of your target group, their behavior and preferences. But that’s not all! The most crucial condiment of this recipe is getting to know your intended market, thoroughly. In other words, study your competitors, the specificity of the market conditions as well as predictions and trends.
Before making any steps towards building MVP products, make sure that the market demand is big enough for you to succeed. It is also possible that the product you are trying to sell already exists. In that case, try to think of ideas to actually convince the clients to switch to your services – show them the value, prove to them that you are special.
Too much feedback
For newbies to the MVP approach, lots of feedback might seem like winning the lottery but in reality, it all depends on the source. Map the opinions from the most reliable targeted customers and draw conclusions from such information in order to support your future vision of the product.
Focusing on every single reference will affect your pace of development, which might delay your final launch of the product and make you lose sight of the bigger picture, and decrease the team morale.
Too many features
Many companies ignore the fact that MVP entails building a product with extremely basic functionalities – it does not need to be ideal! Instead, many ventures would go over the top with implementing unnecessary features. Then the case gets more tangled as we are allocating more time and expenses to the MVP development process. Despite your best intentions, going overboard with features can lead to a delayed launch of the product and result in several other complications in the nearer future.
To stay on the top of your MVP game, determine the product scope before starting your product development process. It should clearly state which basic features will be implemented without any additional fireworks – the time for those will come!
Chasing the minimalism
With MVP, you can easily lose control and go from one extreme to the other. If you decide to omit some key functionalities, the MVP concept will do more harm than good to your product. As your product becomes ineffective and unattractive to customers, you won’t be able to gain feedback and use it to improve your MVP in the future. That is why it is crucial to gain a deeper understanding of your client's core needs and offer the solutions to fulfill them. In other words, find the balance between the scarcity and abundance of features.
Wrong development method
A common mistake, made especially by inexperienced founders, is choosing an unsuitable development methodology that may have actually made sense at first sight but complicated the project's progress in the long term.
The range of software development methods is wide. You can choose Waterfall, Kanban Agile, Lean, Scrum, Feature-Driven Development, and many more. Your project specification should be the factor that determines which option you pick. This decision might be a challenging one, that is why it is advisable to hire MVP development companies in order to save money and time in the long run.
Too many developers involved
Sometimes less is more, and this saying can be a golden rule of MVP as well. Imagine having a huge team of software developers ready to work – sounds like heaven, right? Well, it might not always be as perfect as it looks. A huge team gives you power but an oversized one can significantly slow your development process by giving you the false impression of being busy all the time or simply ruin your budget because of hiring additional experts that only appear necessary in certain cases.
Start small and adjust the number of project members to the workload and project complexity. It will allow you to maintain control over the process and avoid wasteful expenses.
Conclusions
Building an MVP might seem to be an easy venture, judging by the definition of that concept. But as you launch the project, you might get entangled in many mistakes that can kill your product in the end. That is why it is strongly advisable to know the potential threats and be aware of them during the process. It might also be beneficial to use the help of a team that already has experience in implementing these types of projects in order to reduce the costs and save time.
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