How to plan an MVP? || A step by step guide

how do we plan an MVP here is a quick step-by-step guide so before I talk about MVPs please subscribe to our channel to get more great insights and update about a product design UX design sprints and more and now the MVP a lot of our clients approached us after a design sprint and asked us to help them figure out how their MVP should look like today I'm going to share with you exactly how we help them figure out the roadmap and a priority plan for their MVP in this video I assume you already have a

good idea what kind of a solution you're going to offer and who are your users if you don't you should probably do a design sprint first going forward from a concept even a very concrete one into an MVP plan requires careful analysis of the implication of your concept it requires technical and functional analysis your MVP plan should be a kind list activities that you have to run and the most important thing is to come up with a set of priorities because you will probably have to be agile on your MVP most MVP tends to change

as time unfold and that's okay because you are in the business of innovation and changes are part of that game before we drill down on house and watts let's examine the term MVP MVP stands for minimal Viable Product a minimal Viable Product is a version of your product with just enough feature to satisfy early customers and provide feedback for future product development it should answer the question is my idea worth doing while you can validate quite a lot with just a well-designed prototype still before your product actually hits the real market there's a lot of

unknowns to be answered the MVP should be designed to answer at least the major questions you have and it should include a set of feature that will help us understand where and how we should move forward so for us to design and plan an MVP we need to consider two main questions a what makes our product viable and B what's the minimal set of features we need to develop to make this viable partner so how you address this first step core value proposition to answer the question what makes our product viable we need to agree

on the core value proposition of the product we must agree on the pain we are solving and our main target audience the people that feel this pain and would be willing to pay for that solution as focused as we can get on that as narrow as we can be the easier our task will be so you have to consider that the MVP is not our final product it's a tool aim to make us understand our solution and its relationship with the market you should be thinking about it as a starting point for your market experiment

so like in the lab you want to have as little clutter as possible and if you're very focused on a small number of users it would be much easier and cheaper to reach these users once you understand your value proposition growth will be much easier the core value proposition has to be written and agreed on I find it useful to use the following template hearing goes product deem provides service to customer in a culture environment with a voice so helping them feel impact and an x-factor so I'll give you an example red ID provides design

Sprint's to startups and corporates in a structured environment with highly professional voice helping them feel innovative and informed our x-factor is we make ideas see daylight step 2 understand the timeline and budget usually budget is a bit easier because you know how much money you have right but as you hire the team and time becomes money and things become more complex so however you prioritize you must set target timelines so there are many considerations around timeline it can be the cost of the team and market opportunity or an investor directive in any case it should

be very clear feasible as we will need to plan our MVP around time and resources a very common mistake is to forget about go to market budget and only look at the cost of development you should allocate budget for rolling off your MVP and supporting it in many cases these activities are more expensive than you expect and it usually takes more time than you think to get the answers for your MVP also you should think about the cost of maintenance and iteration as you'll most likely you'll make a lot of mistakes in your MVP and

you will need to iterate both your technology and your design to approach this I would first draw a timeline starting today and end in two ears from now then I would look for kpi's describing how success will look like two hours from now if you can't see that far make it a year and a half then I would mark a rough line around the six months time this is a thumb rule for MVP development time and you can be as aggressive of three months but you should take in account that things don't always work the

way you plan them so I usually take six months next think about go to market milestone that are required to achieve your KPIs a good practice is to go backward from the goal setting two to three midterm measurable milestones start with a rough sketch get a general agreement from your peers and product marketing sales in R&D make sure everyone is aligned on the major milestone before you drill down and detail your plan this is very very important step three lists of features once you identify any green on your value proposition you need to outline the

features you would include in your MVP a good way to think about these is to outline the user journey in your product think about two or three major use cases a user will have to do in your product to solve their pain for example an a vacation booking app you would have to enable a filtered search information about the hotel the booking process you probably need to have a sign-up flow to if your core value your differentiator and that app is the ability to communicate with online with our hotel then this also must be included

draw each use case and use your team to write features and development tasks required for each step use post-it for each task this should include everything that comes on your team's mind don't think about cost or complexity think about the use case and how to make it serve the value proposition next group the item based on dependency for example you can't have a search without a search engine and the content database of searchable items do not cluster things that are not absolutely dependent on each other step 4 identify that must-have features these are the basic

stuff you have to enable the must-have features are things that we can't compromise on things that are central to our products experience and we are not willing to compromise on their execution quality think about Google search for example speed is one of the core values of the search engine it was a major differentiator and even the first version had to be fast give each team member three to five dots and ask them to vote on the top three to five tasks that are must-haves finally make the decider select the must-haves and move them under a

list titled must-haves step 5 identify they should have features these features must be included in the MVP the functionality is essential to the user journey like the must-haves but the quality of execution can be compromised at this point for example you may have to have a payment gate on your launch but you can't decide against fancy payment integration and go for only PayPal simple Cart button take all the items that got votes but were not selected for must-haves and group them into their list title should have step 6 think about the could have some of

the features are not necessarily must-have but are worthwhile having we need to think about them as sometimes we get our opportunity to add them either to the MVP itself or in the coming versions it's a good idea to estimate each items cost implication and identify low-hanging fruits you may want to apply dry grid with two axes impact an effort the top left items will become the first items in your could have list and the top right items will be at the end of that list step 7 won't haves after skewing through all the features and

user flows prioritizing and deciding you must have a list of things you will not be doing if you don't have this it's probably a sign that you're not prioritizing well MVP's requires tough decision and not having a list of rejected idea is an alarming sound that may indicate that you don't have a good enough idea about your core value proposition or your target audience if you went through all the steps the only thing you need to do is to grab the low impact items from your prioritization grid and place them in the won't have list

make sure everybody in the organization is well aware that we're not going to do these even if time and resources enable us to do so if we can we will push our launch earlier every piece can become tricky they require strong alignment and strong leadership tough decisions are made and you're bound to make some mistakes but remember it's more important to get started than being right one last tip a good way to get a good MVP plan is by starting with the design sprints if you have a real looking prototype validated with real users your

discussions and decisions are much easier to make if you have any comments or suggestions please write them in the responses section and make sure you subscribe to our channel and get a lot of great products UX and design sprints insights I'll be here next weeks - so bye-bye see you then