From MVP to Market Fit Product, journey of Value, Viability, Usability and Feasibility

---

Great companies are made with great products. As an entrepreneur, you would probably like to launch your product with all features fully functioning, having responded to all problems discovered during the process. But many start-ups fail to reach the stage where their product is considered as product-market fit. Reasons could be the

- Customers aren’t quite getting the value out of the product,

- Sales cycle takes too long or

- Lots of deals might never close etc.

Even if the idea and features are good enough, it takes a lot of iterations through a feedback loop to make it to the point where users perceive it as value. However, the unfortunate reality is that no matter how much you validate and research your product, it will never be perfect.

A more effective approach to product launch, and the best method of product validation, is to get the product into the hands of your customers and have them start to use it. Here, the technique of building an MVP - Minimum Viable Product - comes to our aid which is based on verifying your product with the market from the very beginning. Then make frequent, incremental improvements based on the feedback you solicit and receive. Once you get to know about your customers’ behaviours, needs and confront it with your product abilities, you can start the next iteration of working on it.

Building an MVP prior to the final product saves both time and money, and -

• Focuses on Building the Core
• Gives Early Testing Opportunity
• Helps with User Intelligence and Gathering Feedback
• Allows Market Validation
• Takes Less Time to Develop Your App
• Is Budget-Friendly

So….Is an MVP a Product or not?

Eric Ries Defined -

Minimum Viable Product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.

It is the right choice if you need to validate the demand of your idea, analyse the behaviour and preference of your target audience. MVP helps you to fail fast, which may not sound motivating, but prevents losing too much money and time. Instead of spending a lot of time and resources on developing a fully-featured product, it’s a better idea to develop an MVP which helps you to validate your hypothesis at early stages. It is tangible and convincing as the first validated version of your product. Having great technology experts, a great reputation, and great advisors is definitely a plus point, but if you are not solving a market problem, you will fail.

Let’s emphasise the letter ‘M’ in MVP!

Here, letter M stands for minimum, which includes the basic version with critical features and functionalities of a product which the company wants to launch in the market.

Let’s take an example: For a product if we consider its minimum feature it will only make sense if it is seen as part of a series of tests, validating assumption after assumption. If you ship that feature, and you learn that it works (that assumption was validated), but you don’t take that learning into the next iteration of the Build-Measure-Learn loop. This also means that it tests the current riskiest assumption. Once that assumption has been validated, another assumption becomes the riskiest one, requiring another feature. The right approach is to build a series of features, keeping previous feedback and validating next. Once all critical assumptions including features are validated, then one can build the product out.

Steps to build MVP

• Start with Market Research
• Ideate on Value Addition
• Map Out User Flow
• Prioritise MVP Features
• Launch MVP
• Exercise ‘B.M.L.’ — Build, Measure, Learn

Which will lead to –

• Releasing a product to the market as quickly as possible
• Raising future funds and appease potential investors as they will feel more confident investing in your idea,
• Test an idea with real users that will save time and money.
• Will help learn what resonates with the company’s target market and what doesn’t

Building Features in isolation will not help, it's going to be a disaster, take your product to consumers and create a system of feedback and learning.

Also, you can experience other benefits. Building MVP, you are already building the core of your product. It allows you to bring your idea into the market faster. Software products require a lot of refactoring in the early stages to align the product with customer requirements. When you build a product with only the basic or crucial set of functions, code refactoring and design changes are much easier to implement than in a fully-featured product.

You can focus on the main idea of your product first and the others at a later stage. It helps you better target your customers and this is an opportunity to get early adopters without spending a lot of money on marketing. The user feedback you gather following the MVP will help you to position your product.

ROLE OF CROSS-FUNCTIONAL TEAMS!

Building great products is invigorating, but invests all your energy into building the best possible engineering team first. When a group of committed, focused, and passionate team members play their roles to the best of their abilities it leads to a Successful product.

Value, Usability, Feasibility, Viability !

The purpose should be to solve real problems in order to make customers happy, it means they don’t just focus on delivering features but focus on solving problems while addressing following risks:

• Value (will people buy it, or choose to use it?)
• Usability (can users figure out how to use it? The potential customers.)
• Feasibility (can we build it with the time, skills, and technology we have?)
• Business Viability (will this solution work for the various dimensions of our business?)

One can never finish looking for product/market fit. Even if you think you have it. Product/market fit doesn’t just happen—and then you’re done. You’re never done for perfection. If you have managed to achieve it—let’s celebrate! But now you have to work hard to keep it, calibrate it, and adjust your product to the changing needs of the market.