{"id":23027,"date":"2022-01-18T14:58:04","date_gmt":"2022-01-18T19:58:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.3pillarglobal.com\/?p=23027"},"modified":"2024-08-14T20:09:13","modified_gmt":"2024-08-14T20:09:13","slug":"minimum-viable-product-strategy-toolkit","status":"publish","type":"blog","link":"https:\/\/www.3pillarglobal.com\/insights\/blog\/minimum-viable-product-strategy-toolkit\/","title":{"rendered":"Minimum Viable Product Strategy Toolkit"},"content":{"rendered":"\nWe\u2019ve discussed in detail <a href=\"\/insights\/what-is-an-mvp-and-what-is-it-used-for\/\">key concepts to consider<\/a> and <a href=\"\/insights\/problems-with-minimum-viable-product\/\">pitfalls to avoid<\/a> when you\u2019re planning and building your MVP. But where do you begin when it comes to crafting your big picture strategy?\n<br><br>\nRemember, an MVP is only truly a failure if you don\u2019t learn anything related to product feasibility and a path towards maturity while providing value to the customer at the same time. Before you begin to build, lay the right groundwork and set yourself up to learn. In practice, that means you need a data-driven strategy that considers key success metrics and goals.\n<br><br>\nAs Angel Almada, Director of Solutions Engineering at 3Pillar, explains, \u201cIf you don&#8217;t know where you want to go, you don&#8217;t have a way to measure success. Having a roadmap in the very early stages as you develop a product is key. That roadmap will evolve over time, but we cannot start producing value if we don&#8217;t know what the end goal looks like.\u201d\n<br><br>\nPut differently, if your product is a house, think of your strategy as the blueprints and the MVP as the foundation. This article will discuss the main elements of your MVP strategy to set you up for success.\n<br><br>\n<h2>Make Data-Driven Decisions<\/h2>\nEveryone knows the phrase: \u201cGo with your gut.\u201d According to one <a href=\"https:\/\/theconversation.com\/should-we-worry-that-half-of-americans-trust-their-gut-to-tell-them-whats-true-84259\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">study<\/a>, more than half of Americans rely on their intuition to tell them what\u2019s true. When it comes to your MVP, that approach can lead you astray unless your gut feeling is supported by data, facts, and research. And this <a href=\"https:\/\/online.hbs.edu\/blog\/post\/data-driven-decision-making\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Harvard Business School Blog<\/a> agrees: \u201cWhile intuition can provide a hunch or spark that starts you down a particular path, it&#8217;s through data that you verify, understand, and quantify.\u201d\n<br><br>\nAdditionally, the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.northeastern.edu\/graduate\/blog\/data-driven-decision-making\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Northeastern University Blog<\/a> notes, \u201cWithout the data-driven approach to decision making, Netflix would still be mailing you an outdated mode of movie content, and Amazon would be a simple online bookstore.\u201d An important way to ensure your decisions are, in fact, data-driven is prototyping combined with rigorous user testing to inform scope and roadmap before building your MVP.\n<br><br>\nPart of being data-driven means ensuring there is a robust way to collect customer feedback and monitor behavior. Plan to implement a system to analyze both behavioral and voice-of-the-customer data. This should involve some combination of:\n<br><br>\n<ul>\n \t<li>Collecting feedback: Gain first-hand insights via surveys, questionnaires, and in-app questions that are triggered by certain key behaviors<\/li>\n \t<li>Performing user interviews: Understand where users are getting value (and where they aren\u2019t), as well as identify areas for improvement<\/li>\n \t<li>Implementing instrumentation: Collect data on how a user interacts with the MVP. For example, data should be collected if users uninstall your app or abandon the product at a key stage<\/li>\n \t<li>Your own feedback ecosystem: Gather feedback data if you have the resources or are using a third-party analytics and feedback stack<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>Define Your Scope<\/h2>\nMichael Rabjohns, UX Practice Leader at 3Pillar, stresses, \u201cAn MVP must focus on what\u2019s most important for the end user.\u201d But how can you know what\u2019s important and what\u2019s not? And how do you balance which features to include against other considerations, such as budget? Defining your MVP scope is about making data-based decisions that account for several areas.\n<br><br>\n<strong>The state of the industry:<\/strong> How crowded is the space? Who are your competitors, and how do they solve problems for your target market? What does your main competitor\u2019s pricing model look like? This type of analysis can help you uncover gaps in the market as well as competitors\u2019 weaknesses to capitalize upon. This, in turn, can inform your feature prioritization. Are there \u201cno-fly zones\u201d due to competitors\u2019 intellectual property?\n<br><br>\n<strong>Market segment:<\/strong> Understanding your market segment and distribution channel helps you identify underserved needs your MVP can address. It may even show ways to consolidate distribution layers and capture more profit&#8211;think what Dell did with PC customization. Looking at your market segment can also help you prioritize features.\n<br><br>\n<strong>User interviews:<\/strong> Before you can perform meaningful user interviews that will help you solve for a need, define the job to be done or the problem your product will solve, your user personas, and the ideal user journey. Next, use this knowledge to inform your user interviews to better understand their primary pain points and main frustrations. With this knowledge, you can address the most pressing issues users face and map to your ideal user journey on a \u201cmust-have\/could-have\/nice-to-have\u201d matrix.\n<br><br>\n<strong>Technical feasibility and complexity:<\/strong> <a href=\"\/insights\/whats-the-difference-between-an-mvp-and-a-poc\/\">Answer any doubts about feasibility with a PoC<\/a> before beginning to build anything. Map out the range of complexity of the proposed features and assess where they fall on the \u201cmust-have\/could-have\/nice-to-have\u201d spectrum to help prioritize inclusion. If there is any fear over technical feasibility (Can I make it work?) or financial feasibility (Can I offer it at a competitive price?)\u2014a PoC is advised. It\u2019s best to get all of those issues sorted out with a focused, lower-expense event.\n<br><br>\n<strong>Cost:<\/strong> Establish business-critical metrics to help guide the MVP implementation, including your budget and net and gross profit margin.\n<br><br>\n<h2>Define Your Measure(s) of Success<\/h2>\nTo arrive at your measure of success, clearly articulate what you\u2019re setting out to test with your MVP. Ask yourself: What is your riskiest assumption? Generally, it\u2019s whether or not people will actually want to pay for your product to solve their problem.\n<br><br>\nWhile you can&#8211;and should&#8211;set out to measure multiple metrics with your MVP\u2014conversions, clicks, views, etc.\u2014clearly define measure(s) of success to guide future actions.\n<br><br>\nWhat specific metric(s) will give you the most insight about whether or not your product is viable? This will be specific to your product and how you define success\u2014it could be the number of downloads, purchases, or conversions.\n<br><br>\n<h2>Define Your Next Steps<\/h2>\nThe feedback and behavioral data, metrics, and measure of success you\u2019ve collected will guide your next post-MVP steps: Do you buy, build, partner, or kill? In addition, define your roadmap with the next set of features to evaluate.\n<br><br>\nWhether or not you buy or build requires a cost- and trade-off analysis. Consider partnering if you discover you need to add features that require skills or capabilities you don\u2019t have. Partnering can also help accelerate development on a tight deadline. Deciding to kill your MVP can feel painful, but it\u2019s critical to be realistic: \u201cHave the courage to kill products that are no longer core to your strategy and may be replaced by new products you build,\u201d advises Bernie Doone, Director of Information Services at 3Pillar.\n<br><br>\nThere are a lot of moving parts to think about when creating your strategy. A product vision or lean canvas is very helpful at this stage, even if it is a draft or hypothesis. Remember that you can revise the specific elements based on data gleaned from research once you\u2019ve gathered that information.\n<br><br>\n<h2>Conclusion<\/h2>\nDefining your goals and crafting your strategy before beginning to build your MVP is a critical ingredient for success. But keep in mind, there\u2019s no such thing as a \u201cperfect\u201d MVP. In fact, with MVPs, perfect is the enemy of done.\n<br><br>\nAccording to Kathryn Rosaaen, Global Manager, Product Development at 3Pillar, \u201cOne of the biggest issues with MVP failures is that we waited too long to launch to production, thereby postponing our learning. So one really needs to quickly and precisely identify what we think the true need is, be disciplined in selecting \u2018just-right\u2019 set of features with an end goal of getting the product out in the market, so we can learn even more and refine our product for it to eventually evolve towards the \u2018big hit\u2019 we envision.\u201d\n<br><br>\nAnd above all else, make sure that your decisions are driven by data, not by gut feelings alone.\n<br><br>\nTo learn more about 3Pillar&#8217;s services and how we can help you create a minimum viable product to test and validate your assumptions with real customers, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.3pillarglobal.com\/contact\/\">contact an expert today<\/a>.\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We\u2019ve discussed in detail key concepts to consider and pitfalls to avoid when you\u2019re planning and building your MVP. But where do you begin when it comes to crafting your big picture strategy? Remember, an MVP is only truly a failure if you don\u2019t learn anything related to product feasibility and a path towards maturity [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":29755,"template":"","industry-types":[],"service-types":[40],"topics":[25,26],"class_list":["post-23027","blog","type-blog","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v25.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>MVP Toolkit - Minimum Viable Product Strategy - 3Pillar<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Defining and prioritizing MVP features is a critical part of the strategy. 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