Minimum Viable Product

Minimum Viable Product or MVP is a strategy used for fast and quantitative market testing of a product or product feature.

A Minimum Viable Product has just those features that allow the product to be deployed, and no more. The product is typically deployed to a subset of possible customers, such as early adopters that are thought to be more forgiving, more likely to give feedback, and able to grasp a product vision from an early prototype or marketing information. It is a strategy targeted at avoiding building products that customers do not want, that seeks to maximize the information learned about the customer per dollar spent. "The 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." The definition's use of the words maximum and minimum means it is decidedly not formulaic. It requires judgment to figure out, for any given context, what MVP makes sense.

An MVP is not a minimal product, it is a strategy and process directed toward making and selling a product to customers. It is an iterative process of idea generation, prototyping, presentation, data collection, analysis and learning. One seeks to minimize the total time spent on an iteration. The process is iterated until a desirable product-market fit is obtained, or until the product is deemed to be non-viable.

Techniques :

A Minimum Viable Product may be an entire product or a sub-set of product (such as a feature).

· Product: (smoke test) The canonical MVP strategy for a web application is to create a mock website for the product and purchase online advertising to direct traffic to the site. The mock website may consist of a marketing landing page with a link for more information or purchase. The link is not connected to a purchasing system, instead clicks are recorded and measure customer interest.

· Feature: (deploy first, code later) A link to a new feature in a web application may be provided in a prominent location on an existing website. The feature is not implemented, rather an apology, mock-up, or marketing page is provided. Clicks of the link are recorded and provide an indication as to the demand for the feature in the customer base.


Differentiation:

Releasing and assessing the impact of a minimum viable product is a market testing strategy that is used to screen product ideas soon after their generation..

The MVP differs from the conventional market testing strategy of investing time and money early to implement a product before testing it in the market. The MVP is intended to ensure that the market wants the product before a large time and monetary investment is made. The MVP differs from the open source methodology of release early, release often that listens to users, letting them define the features and future of the product. The MVP starts with a product vision, which is maintained throughout the product life cycle, although is adapted based on the explicit and implicit (indirect measures) feedback from potential future customers of the product.

The MVP is a strategy that may be used as a part of Steven Blank's customer development methodology that focuses on continual product iteration and refinement based on customer feedback. Additionally, the presentation of non-existing products and features may be refined using web-based statistical hypothesis testing, such as A/B testing.

The general method of deploy first, code later is akin to the agile program code testing methodology called test-driven development where unit tests are written before and fail until the code is written.

Scrum Methodology

Scrum is an iterative and incremental agile software development framework for managing software projects and product or application development. Scrum focuses on project management institutions where it is difficult to plan ahead. With Scrum, projects progress via a series of iterations called sprints

The Scrum sprint itself is the main activity of a Scrum project. Scrum is an iterative and incremental process and so the project is split into a series of consecutive sprints. Each is timeboxed, usually to between one week and a calendar month.  During this time the scrum team does everything to take a small set of features from idea to coded and tested functionality.

The first activity of each sprint is a sprint planning meeting. During this meeting the product owner and team talk about the highest-priority items on the scrum product backlog. Team members figure out how many items they can commit to and then create a sprint backlog, which is a list of the tasks to perform during the sprint.

On each day of the Scrum sprint, a daily scrum meeting is attended by all team members, including the ScrumMaster and the product owner. This meeting is timeboxed to no more than fifteen minutes. During that time, team members share what they worked on the prior day, will work on today, and identify any impediments to progress. Daily scrums serve to synchronize the work of team members as they discuss the work of the sprint.

At the end of a Scrum sprint, the teams conducts a sprint review. During the sprint review, the team demonstrates the functionality added during the sprint. The goal of this meeting is to get feedback from the product owner or any users or other stakeholders who have been invited to the review. This feedback may result in changes to the freshly delivered functionality. But it may just as likely result in revising or adding items to the scrum product backlog.

Another activity performed at the end of each sprint is the sprint retrospective. The whole team participates in this meeting, including the ScrumMaster and product owner. The meeting is an opportunity to reflect on the sprint that is ending and identify opportunities to improve in the new sprint.

PS: In software development and product management, a user story is one or more sentences in the everyday or business language of the end user or user of a system that captures what a user does or needs to do as part of his or her job function. User stories are used with Agile software development methodologies as the basis for defining the functions a business system must provide, and to facilitate requirements management. It captures the 'who', 'what' and 'why' of a requirement in a simple, concise way, often limited in detail by what can be hand-written on a small paper notecard. User stories are written by or for the business user as that user's primary way to influence the functionality of the system being developed. User stories may also be written by developers to express non-functional requirements (security, performance, quality, etc.), though primarily it is the task of a product manager to ensure user stories are captured.

"As a <role>,I want <goal> so that <benefit>"

Lean Startup Philosophy

"Lean Startup" is an approach for launching businesses and products, that relies on validated learning, scientific experimentation, and iterative product releases to shorten product development cycles, measure progress, and gain valuable customer feedback. In this way, companies, especially startups, can design their products or services to meet the demands of their customer base without requiring large amounts of initial funding or expensive product launches.

Minimum viable product

A minimum viable product (MVP) is the "version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort. The goal of an MVP is to test fundamental business hypotheses (or leap-of-faith assumptions) and to help entrepreneurs begin the learning process as quickly as possible. As an example, Zappos founder Nick Swinmurn wanted to test the hypothesis that customers were ready and willing to buy shoes online. Instead of building a website and a large database of footwear, Swinmurn approached local shoe stores, took pictures of their inventory, posted the pictures online, bought the shoes from the stores at full price, and sold them directly to customers if they purchased the shoe through his website. Swinmurn deduced that customer demand was present, and Zappos would eventually grow into a billion dollar business based on the model of selling shoes online.

Continuous deployment

Continuous deployment is a process “whereby all code that is written for an application is immediately deployed into production,” which results in a reduction of cycle times. 

 Split testing

A split or A/B test is an experiment in which "different versions of a product are offered to customers at the same time." The goal of a split test is to observe changes in behavior between the two groups and to measure the impact of each version on an actionable metric.

A/B testing can also be performed in serial fashion where a group of users one week may see one version of the product while the next week users see another. This can be criticized in circumstances where external events may influence user behavior one time period but not the other. For example a split test of two ice cream flavors performed in serial during the summer and winter would see a marked decrease in demand during the winter where that decrease is mostly related to the weather and not to the flavor offer.

Actionable metrics

Actionable metrics can lead to informed business decisions and subsequent action.These are in contrast to 'vanity metrics' - measurements that give “the rosiest picture possible” but do not accurately reflect the key drivers of a business.

Vanity metrics for one company may be actionable metrics for another. For example, a company specializing in creating web based dashboards for financial markets might view the number of web page views per person as a vanity metric as their revenue is not based on number of page views. However, an online magazine with advertising would view web page views as a key metric as page views as directly correlated to revenue.

Typical examples of a vanity metric are the number of new users gained per day. While a high number of users gained per day seems beneficial to any company, if the cost of acquiring each user through expensive advertising campaigns is significantly higher than the revenue gained per user, then gaining more users could quickly lead to bankruptcy.

Pivot

A pivot is a “structured course correction designed to test a new fundamental hypothesis about the product, strategy, and engine of growth. A notable example of a company employing the pivot is Groupon; when the company first started, it was an online activism platform called The Point. After receiving almost no traction, the founders opened a WordPress blog and launched their first coupon promotion for a pizzeria located in their building lobby. Although they only received 20 redemptions, the founders realized that their idea was significant, and had successfully empowered people to coordinate group action.

 FYI : Originally developed in 2008 by Eric Ries with high-tech companies in mind, the lean startup philosophy has since been expanded to apply to any individual, team, or company looking to introduce new products or services into the market.Today, the lean startup’s popularity has grown outside of its Silicon Valley birthplace and has spread throughout the world, in large part due to the success of Ries' bestselling book, The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

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