If you want to implement a lean product development process, working with a minimum viable product (MVP) could be a great approach. But what does that mean, and how can you utilize MVPs within your product team?
This article deep-dives into a minimum viable product (MVP) and how it’s defined, specifically for product management. You'll hear from Pulkit Agrawal, co-founder at Chameleon—a product success and user onboarding SaaS—to help you understand what an MVP is and how you can utilize it with customer feedback to build more informed products.
Here’s what you’ll learn:
A minimum viable product (MVP) is the first version of a product fit for market. An MVP has core functionality and, coupled with customer feedback, is a learning tool for product teams to release new features and better iterations of the product.
To get a deeper understanding of the purpose of a minimum viable product, we spoke to Pulkit Agrawal, co-founder at Chameleon—a SaaS onboarding tool for consumer-centered product growth.
Pulkit said defining an MVP depends on what you need to test.
For example, if you're doing problem validation—which is when you test to ensure you understand problems before creating solutions—your MVP might be a feature-lite prototype to assess whether there's a real problem, if people are interested in finding a solution, and if there’s demand for your solution.
Or, if you want to test a new feature for your existing product, you could develop an MVP of that feature and release it to a segment of users to understand if the full version is worth pursuing and rolling out for all users.
But one of the most significant purposes of an MVP is to ensure customer delight by enabling you to make product decisions based on customer feedback as early as possible in the development process.
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Working with an MVP helps product teams prioritize workflows and deliver solutions, fast. It provides an early opportunity to gather a wealth of qualitative and quantitative data about how customers experience the product—rather than waiting until everything is perceived as perfect.
For example, you might prioritize one feature of your product during development, only to discover later that users make little use of it. But by releasing an MVP, you can see they’re making great use of another feature, which you thought was comparatively minor, and which had been given low priority by the team. Having access to this information before you’ve poured more time and resources into the wrong features means you’re better placed to build a product people want.
This reliance on customer data over guesswork gives you the confidence to release new features and product iterations that are more likely to attract and retain customers—which can be especially important when using methodologies that encourage teams to move quickly and learn from continuous feedback (for instance, agile product teams).
How can product teams use a minimum viable product?
Product teams can use an MVP to:
And product teams can take MVP data even further by having it:
But of course, there are other ways to use an MVP beyond those mentioned above. For example, Chameleon originally built a self-serve widget—quickly and in advance of their planned roadmap—to retain a customer, which their scrappy product team quickly evolved into an entirely new product:
“In the early days, we had product tours, but we didn’t have anything that was remotely like a self-serve widget or a checklist. One of our customers wanted this and were considering an alternative provider that offered it at the time. So we said: look, we know we want to build this anyway, but we’ll accelerate our roadmap because we have a customer creating demand for it.”