The Solution
Stop the scope creep and stick to something that you can truly test, quickly and efficiently. An MVP that your users are going to enjoy to use and find useful without a confusion of other features. Here are some quick tips that have helped us and our clients create a real MVP:
Top 5 Pointers
- Educate everyone on what an MVP really is. It is easy to bandy around the term Minimum Viable Product without anyone really discussing what that means. Talk about it and show good digital and non digital examples of releasing an MVP.
- Ensure everyone involved understands the value of an MVP. This isn't just to be lazy and do less. This is going to allow you to test the success of the priority features in a small amount of time and much lower cost.
- Remember why an MVP is better for the user. MVPs clearly make good business sense, but they also make good UX sense. A customer doesn't want to be confused by a multitude of calls to actions and functionalities. They want something to be clearly useful quickly without confusion or questions.
- Get everyone involved in choosing and prioritizing the scope. Buy-in is absolutely essential for developing a REAL MVP. Make sure your stakeholders, client and development team are all involved in the process to decide priority features for the MVP. Otherwise later down the line team members or clients will start to slip in some features of their own that only they are convinced by. Make sure your priorities are based on evidence and not assumptions. Don't live in an echo chamber of your team's beliefs.
- Prioritize real features, rather than a huge scope summarised to a one-liner. We see this happen all the time. Clients and product teams alike come to us and say "but look we only have 10 features! We can do all of those in our MVP." What they really have is a backlog that could last a year written onto 1 backlog. 'Community and friends' is not a feature, 'Geolocation and user generated reviews' is not one feature. Break down your features to a realistic level to begin to get a good feel with the product owner and developers for the timelines.
