Build quickly a Minimum Viable Product

In this article, I would like to share some tips in order to get to a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) in the Lean Startup approach.

A Minimal Viable Product (MVP) allows the product owner to test his hypothesis and have quick feedback for future development. Below are some tips to optimize the designing and development process of a MVP.

It’s essential to first hear out the opinion of your stakesholders. The most efficient way would be to organize an ideation workshop and have people agree collectively on an user story map. It’s important to remain neutral and not hesitate to ask them to draw sketches to precise their ideas. These will help you save significant time later on.

Once the synthesis of the workshop done, it’s possible to complete this process by conducting indepth interviews. It’s important during these sessions, to get their opinions and perceptions on different feature propositions. The questions can be formulated in a dysfunctional form in order to keep only essential needs (Kano method) :

Sometimes your stakeholders might not be the end users of your product. In this case, you also need to look at your competition and study the market, to verify your business potential.

With the above, you should have all the information to create user stories and organize them in a priority backlog. You should concentrate on planning only Must-have minimal features (MoSCoW method).

Drawing wireframes of your MVP is essential to explain the story map clearly and efficiently. It’s easy understandable by both stakeholders and developer team and introduce the right questions. Graphical detailed mockups are not be necessary because they consume much time.

Be prepare to give precisions on input fields to your team as these have direct implications on the application architecture :

Before beginning the development, you should agree on a graphical charter with all navigation and viewing elements. The use of an establishedtheme like Material Design or similar modern examples can save a lot of time and energy of hiring an UI/UX expert.

Once the product backlog has sufficient essential features, it’s time to start the sprints. For a MVP, it’s important to keep user stories as simple as possible to move forward as quickly as possible. This means the development should concentrate on :

Please note that some of the recommendations above might not be suitable if you plan to release your MVP to the general public.

If the goal is to have the most people using your MVP, you should take care of your end users :

With the above, you are now ready to attract more and more users while making continuous improvements to your product.

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