Introduction to Agile MVP
MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product. Agile Minimum Viable Product is defined as a product equipped with features to satisfy the customers and to collect and accumulate the feedbacks of the customers for future enhancement of the product development. Agile MVP is a collection of three terms each one having a significant meaning:
- Minimum: Symbolizing that it uses minimum and simple set of features delivering.
- Viable: Delivering customer value and improving customer satisfaction, collecting customer feedback.
- Product: End product.
Agile Minimum Viable Product is the smallest unit of the Agile Project Management that delivers customer value. Analyzing the acumens collected from the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) proves to be less expensive than developing a product with full-fledged features as developing a product with full-fledged features directly without any analysis increase the risk and cost involved due to incorrect assumptions. Agile MVP is an iterative process which is based on data accumulated from the continuous feedback. Minimum Viable Product is based on key features like a minimum set of features, customer feedback, and minimum effort.
What is the Purpose of using MVP in Implementing the Agile Practices?
Below are the various reasons for using the Agile Minimum Viable Product (Agile MVP):
1. Agile MVP enables testing of a product with the use of minimum resources. Accelerate learning.
2. Helps to improve customer satisfaction and collects information for product enhancement through feedbacks.
3. Eradicates unnecessary wastage for working hours.
4. Helpful to create a foundation for other products based on the data collected through continuous feedback.
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5. Helps to establish brand building.
6. Get the product to early customers as soon as possible.
7. Agile Minimum Viable Product is extremely helpful in bridging the communication gaps between the customer and product developer and also different cross-functional teams working on the product.
8. The MVP’s facilitate product design and cost-effective product development activities.
9. Agile Minimum Viable Product provides a systematic and organized approach to explore the untouched areas of achieving the best of customer value and the organization’s success.
10. The Agile MVP provides validated learning as it is based on the iterative process of continuous feedback.
11. Agile MVP helps to avoid capital loss and avoid failure in any venture.
12. To create good customer relations.
Maximum products or services that we use today are based on the concept of Agile Minimum Viable Product like Facebook, Airbnb, Groupon, Dropbox, buffer, etc. These products developed and were loaded with full-fledged features on an incremental basis rather than making it full-fledged at the initial stage. The developer came up with new versions of the products based on the feedbacks collected from the customers and made it productive and efficient enough to be loved by the customers. Creating and using a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) helps to streamline the product development to avoid any uninformed decisions. Minimum Viable Product is focussed on the customer’s feedback before launching a fully-fledged product.
How to Create a Minimum Viable Product?
Building an agile MVP is a systematic and iterative approach based on customer’s feedback. The process of building a Minimum Viable Product is divided into different steps listed below:
1. Recognizing Business Needs
The first step in developing any product is to identify and analyze business and market needs. The business need can be either customer’s need or the organization’s need based on the market’s demand. A successful entrepreneur must do market study and homework before starting the project. It is important to study the competitors and the mood of the customers and the market to make the product stand out among the rest of the others. It is important to forecast and enlist the long term business goals.
2. Business Roadmap
Drafting a roadmap depends on factors like the type of customer and what the customer expects from the product. It is important to determine the user flow and the user actions to achieve the end goal of the product or service bearing the customer satisfaction on top priority. The process should be designed or drafted in such a way that it gives the visuals on how to design or streamline product development or service implementation. Creating a roadmap helps to understand the customer’s perspective of the product.
3. Creating Pain and Gain map to Identify Pain Points
The next important step after drafting the roadmap is to analyze the strength and pain areas of the actions. The pain and gain map enables to identify the pain areas and to rectify them. Once the pain areas are rectified, the pain and gain map helps to analyze the gains once the pain areas are addressed. The pain and gain map helps to analyze and remove any potential pain point and to improve customer satisfaction.
4. Adding the Required Features as Per the Collected Data in each Iteration
This step is all about adding the user’s required features to the products and prioritizing the features as per the accumulated data. It is important to add the features which are important for product and services success rather than overloading it with unnecessary features.
Benefits of using Agile Minimal Viable Product (Agile MVP)
To execute Agile MVP you should first know what are its benefits, let’s look at some of the benefits explained below.
1. Early Testing of Business Concepts
Agile Minimum Viable Product (MVP) offers a core set of features at the early stage of product/service development allowing the business to test the various business concepts and strategies at an early stage through various hypothesis and to understand the customer and the market’s mood. The data accumulated through the hypothesis helps to market the product quickly and to reach out to maximum customers.
2. Continuous Learning and Development
The MVP is a continuous iterative process which promotes continuous learning based on customer feedback and to gain insight into what works for the customer. This information helps the product development teams to use this data to make decisions for product evolution and product improvement. The iterations help to add more user required features.
3. Cost Reduction and Smaller Investments
The market is studied in advance and the hypothesis is made to test the business concept, this allows the product development team to reduce the expenses and to provide maximum services and highest customer value at minimum cost. At smaller investments, a number of customers are gained and further the investment can be increased based on the number of customers/users.
4. Successful Fully Fledge Products/Services Development and Good Hold on the Market
Due to the customer needs and the market’s mood, the organization gets a good hold on the market and higher customer satisfaction is achieved. A number of user required features are added to the product/services based on the data accumulated in the iterations to make the product fully fledged, successful and stand-out among other products in the market.
In a nutshell, building an agile MVP is a primary requirement for the substantial success of any business or software development as it gives the insights of the customer requirement rather than making them overloaded with unnecessary features making the product usage, like solving a puzzle or maze.
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