What Not to Do When Building a Minimum Viable Product [Common MVP Mistakes]

What is an MVP?

An MVP or a Minimum Viable Product is a release of a product that only has the most essential features and nothing more. Among its other uses, an MVP allows the organisation to better develop a business idea by collecting user feedback. Building an MVP goes through these phases:

–> Iteration 1:

• Market Research
• Developing Value Proposition(s)
• Map Out the User Flow
• Feature Prioritization
• Launch
• BML

–> Iteration 2

–> Iteration 3

–> …

–> …

–> …

–> Iteration n

Developing an MVP can cost anywhere between $5k to $50k depending on the product type and the number of features.

Why Do You Need an MVP?

There are several reasons why you should develop a minimum viable product before developing a full-fledged project. The most important ones are:

• Start selling your product/service before the final product is realised.
• Attracting early adopters.
• Build a market-suitable product.
• Showcase the product to potential investors and backers.
• Collect feedback to enhance the product.
• Kickstart marketing endeavours for your product.

The reasons can be many but these are the most essential reasons that a minimum viable product might be required by your organisation.

Some people might confuse MVP for a POC, which is something entirely different. Unlike MVP, which is a product, a proof-of-concept is a document summing up the technical feasibility of a business idea.

Check out How PoC is Different from MVP.

6 Common MVP Mistakes to Avoid While Building Your Business Idea

Creating a minimum viable product facilitates businesses to test their business idea’s worth without investing all of the money and resources available. To ensure the best MVP software development, you must sway common development mistakes that can lead to a blunder.

Let’s talk about the heart of the matter now. These are the mistakes that you need to avoid while building an MVP:

1.Choosing the Wrong Development Method

Adopting the correct development method is integral to the success of building a minimum viable product. Kicking off MVP development without building a sound understanding of development methods can yield undesired and even catastrophic results.

Although there are several types of development methods, two of three of the most commonly used are agile, waterfall, and DevOps. While the waterfall is the classical approach to software development, agile is a modern approach that prioritises early testing and development in iterations. DevOps is an entirely different story.

Based on the present market conditions, agile and DevOps are more flexible and efficient than the traditional approach. However, it might not always be that way. For example, developing a small product is better when done with the waterfall approach. Therefore, choosing the right approach can make or break your minimum viable product. Choose wisely!

2.Downplaying Feedback in Building an MVP

Feedback is an important aspect of developing a minimum viable product. The feedback and opinions gained from the end-users are what reveal the product is lacking, being repetitive, or unwanted. It is what helps you to polish your product.

Post improving the product, the organisation decides to either make it the final product or put it in the loop again to gain feedback again and use it to further improve their product. This is called the BML or Build-Measure-Learn approach. It repeats until the product is finalised.

3.Less Research on the Problem Intended to be Solved

Every product or service is a solution to achieve something. Creating a product depends on the problem that needs to be solved. Before delving wholeheartedly into developing a business project, one needs to ensure that the product is worth creating.

Answering questions like who is this for, what problem will the product solve, and is the proposed idea an effective solution to the problem is mandatory to ensure that you’re on the right track.

Instead of focusing on everyone, start with a certain someone. Once you identify your audience and become positive that your product will solve the problem effectively, it’s time to give a form to your idea.

4.Not Knowing the Difference Between Qualitative and Quantitative Feedback

Collecting data from the target users is important. It is of two types, namely qualitative and quantitative feedback. To achieve favourable results, one needs to take care of both.

Emphasising one over the other will impact the conclusion you reach at. The correct balance between the two is important to make intelligent business decisions.

Quantitative feedback is usually in the form of metrics that helps to identify various tasks and the difficulty to do them. It assesses the usability of the design, but indirectly.

Qualitative feedback, on the other hand, helps to uncover aspects related to the user-friendliness and quality of the product. It assesses the usability of the system directly.

Triangulation Feedback is the process of collecting data and using it to present an accurate interpretation by considering several factors. It simply means combining qualitative feedback with quantitative feedback.

This allows for predicting and mitigating threats that could result in product failure. The whole point is to consider both types of feedback to deduce a common conclusion that makes development easy and imbues confidence in decision-makers.

5.Skipping Building the Prototype

The prototype is to MVP what MVP is to a fully-functional product. It can be considered as the MVP of an MVP. The product development process involves evolving an idea from a unique concept into a fully-functional product.

A prototype bridges the transition state between the idea and a full-blown business product. Any ideal prototype should have Goldilocks Quality, which simply means creating a prototype with enough quality that generates honest reactions from customers.

In other words, Goldilocks Quality is the sweet spot between too much quality and too less quality.

6.Targeting Everyone

In marketing, the buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of the ideal customer for a business or business product. Identifying the same before creating an MVP is important but sometimes businesses forget or omit to do so and yield unsuitable minimum viable products that are not viable at all, not at least for the ideal customer.

After building a prototype, the next step is to validate the same via testing. For doing so, you need to collect feedback from the target audience.

Adding people that don’t fit the decided buyer persona will yield unnecessary feedback that can make the final product unfit for many reasons.

Conclusion

These are 6 of the most common MVP mistakes that you need to avoid while developing a minimum viable product. Doing so will ensure that you develop a suitable MVP for your business product or service.

Hiring a reputed MVP development company like Apptunix will ensure that you follow the best practices while developing your minimum viable product.