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Launching an MVP can be a great strategy for your company especially if you’re a startup. You can read more about MVP in our blog HERE and what are the advantages in doing it. Even if your product is still in progress stage, you need to assess the product and its objective before launching.
After defining MVP and what good it will good to your company, this article will now discuss assessing your MVP before launching it. After all, building an MVP will still cost money, time and resource. Find out how will you know when you’re ready to launch and how to launch it.
Launching your MVP can be exciting and anxiety-inducing at the same time. Your product’s future is on the line and its success is critical to what will be release. It’s best to check if what you’re launching will generate the important data you need while providing value to the user. Your team should exhaust their best effort based on their knowledge and access. Here are some questions to ask when developing your minimum viable product.
The product you will build must be aligned to the business’ strategic goals. There will bean allocated resource and manpower so it has to be aligned to the overall business goal. MVP is usually done by startups when testing out a new product or attracting a new market demographic. However, established businesses can still use MVP to design new functionality for existing customers.
Defining your target market involves research and definition of the customer journey.
Target market definition is clearly defining who you want the MVP to work for. The details past age and gender are important - are they homemakers, employed, graduate, or business owners? These things can give focus on the features and the kind of marketing you will be doing for your product.
Customer journey is the map of how a customer encounters your brand. Who are they, what kind of media they consume, and what factors affect their decision before they seek out your service or product. Identify how their journey ends and what is the desired action for them to get the solution.
This lets you and the team understand the customer better from their reasons to buying in the first place and what will they encounter along the way. With this defined, you can also review the market size and potential profitability.
After getting to know the customer, it’s time to see what are their pain points. You can create a Pain and Gain Map. This process lets you determine what part in the customer journey has the potential to add value. You can focus the features of your MVP in these areas and be able to identify profitability and check feasibility with your team.
There can be different approaches to solve a problem and finding the right one is important. There are ideas that look great onpaper but becomes difficult to execute in actual. When figuring out a solution, you will also come across features to support it.
When deciding on a solution, you can create opportunity statements where the developing team can target to. A product roadmap can help identify how to create the solutions needed for the project. This can also give focus on what features to include and prioritize for the project. Some can be pipelines while some can be that defining feature to make the MVP a success.
Once you have an idea of how your MVP will work, make sure it can collect data for your team. That’s the point of releasing an MVP right? Your MVP needs to be able to generate statistics that can be reviewed by the team for improvement. Insights gathered from this can be used to update your MVP. Don’t also forget to setup a feedback system to get reviews from actual users and use the opportunity to build brand relationship as well.
Once you can positively answer the questions, your MVP is ready to be launched. Don’t use MVP as an excuse for releasing a poorly made product or the experiment might not yield realistic results. Never forget the “V” which is viable so ensure that the function will be usable for the customer. Releasing your MVP is all about improvement and insight gathering on what customers want and need without the heavy investment.
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