Creating a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

Six things to consider for a successful minimal product release

The waterfall method was a widely used approach for developing a product. In this method, you’d list the requirements, design to those specs, implement, and then verify with customers after releasing. This method requires building out an entire product with all the necessary functionalities. The problem with this method is that it takes a long time to release the product, and by the time it is released, customer needs may have changed.

A part of the software product management process is developing a minimum viable product. It can also be referred to as a minimum viable release (MVR). An MVP is a term used to define the minimal set of functionalities needed to reach the hands of customers for a new product or feature. The MVP must have enough feature capabilities for early testers to use and provide constructive feedback.

Why is the MVP process important?

With the rise of agile methodologies, particularly used in software development, it allows for cheaper releases of new products and faster iterations for teams to adjust throughout the product lifecycle. It is meant to be iterative and customer-centric, allowing teams to fail fast and pivot quickly. Before getting started with an MVP, you must understand the goals, outcomes of the product, objectives, target audience, and how you are measuring success

💡 While agile methods are great for industries like software development, things like hardware require a slower, more precise approach and may continue using the waterfall method.

So, how do you determine what goes into the MVP for your product?

1. Identify and prioritize the features
2. Determine release schedule
3. Re-prioritize your features based on the schedule
4. Identify customers to test and provide feedback
5. Iterate on customer feedback and learnings
6. Communicate with stakeholders

In this post, we’ll use the following example to go through each stage of developing the MVP.

You are a product manager at a healthcare company, Health R’Us. Your management team has an initiative to increase customer satisfaction and engagement by making the doctor-patient relationship more accessible. The new product is an app designed to help patients engage with their healthcare providers and stay up to date with their latest healthcare information.

Identify and prioritize the features

Deciding which features are most important in this most critical step in designing the MVP. This determines what you need to build for it to be usable by your customers. The challenging part here is adding just enough capabilities that makes the product usable, but also making sure you can meet the timelines to get it in the customer’s hands.

When examining the features, think about the customer. What things would they need in a step-by-step approach to complete the intended tasks your product is meant to solve? Don’t limit your feature list at this stage; write it as more of a wish list. Once you have your feature wish list, organize it by what is most critical for usability. This is often referred to as your P0 items.

P0	Top priority feature, essential to the usability of the product. Without this feature, it would delay the product’s release.
P1	Also, a priority feature, but if we are limited on time/resources, we can skip and release later.
P2	Not a top priority but a nice to have feature.

This might be what your feature list looks like

Item	Feature	Priority
1	Download an app from the iOS/Android store	P0
2	Secured login credentials	P0
3	Profile with saved settings	P0
4	Synced to the doctor’s offices for uploads and downloads of patient notes and test results	P0
5	Password reset capabilities	P0
6	View upcoming appointments	P0
7	Send and receive messages to providers	P0
8	Provide feedback through the app	P0
9	View/update medications and prescriptions	P0
10	Reschedule upcoming appointments	P0
11	Pay bills through the app	P0
12	View and schedule preventative care recommendations	P1
13	Facial ID log in	P2
14	Sync health to fitness apps	P2

Determine release schedule

You don’t want your product to stay in this minimal release for too long. After all, the goal of your product is likely to bring in new patients and revenue. Figure out what your go-to-market (when you need to release) date is and develop a timeline for your milestones working back from that date. To work backward, you need to understand the cost of each priority you have written down as essential. Here’s a very high-level example:

You work as a product manager for a healthcare company, and you need to deliver a new app in 8 months that allows patients to access their information. Let’s say 8 months from now is July. Your schedule may look like this:

October: Provide design spec and requirements to engineering for review

November: Begin development on P0 features

January: Gather patients for testing

March: Deliver MVP release to a select group of customers

May: Collect feedback from customers

June: Iterate and integrate feedback

July: launch new app to patients

Once you’ve listed the major milestones, determine which items can be done in parallel. This highly depends on how much time you’d like to give your customers. Will you use real patients? If so, how frequently are their doctor visits? That would determine how often they use the app. Narrowing down your customers to frequent patients may also take time to get through. There’s also going to be a plethora of security, compliance, and regulatory compliance you’d need to add time for. Does 9 months seem reasonable? Whether it is or it’s not, you need to show your work to your management to prove your case and ensure your team will meet reasonable expectations.

You may need to build in some slack to your timelines because things happen, challenges arise, team members may not be available, or requirements could change. It’s good to set aggressive timelines for milestones, but make sure they’re realistic for your team. Nothing is more demotivating than having goals that are not possible. Make sure you understand how the risk of delays at every milestone would impact the release.

Re-prioritize your features based on the schedule

Now that you have a rough timeline and your development team has provided you with the cost of your P0 features, you may need to make some hard choices about what is realistic. So go back through your list and reprioritize. There may be some P0 items that need to become P1s.

Here’s your new prioritized list:

Item	Feature	Priority
1	Download an app from the iOS/Android store	P0
2	Secured login credentials	P0
3	Profile with saved settings	P0
4	Synced to the doctor’s offices for uploads and downloads of patient notes and test results	P0
5	Password reset capabilities	P0
6	View upcoming appointments	P0
7	Send and receive messages to providers	P0
8	Provide feedback through the app	P0
9	View/update medications and prescriptions	P0 P1
10	Reschedule upcoming appointments	P0 P1
11	Pay bills through the app	P0 P1
12	View and schedule preventative care recommendations	P1
13	Facial ID log in	P2
14	Sync health to fitness apps	P2

Identify customers to test and provide feedback

An important part of an MVP release is ensuring you are able to get feedback from customers. Continuing with the healthcare app example, there’s a few things you may want from your customers.

• Patients who have the time and are willing to test

The hardest part about MVPs is getting customers to actively test and provide feedback in a reasonable time. It may be hard to identify these patients, but having signage at doctors’ offices, or getting your healthcare providers to offer it as patients come in can be a great way to solicit patients to try out your new system.

• Patients who are frequently seeing providers over the course of your test phase

Healthcare may not be a great example for this due to HIPPA constraints, but you would also want to target patients who will be coming into the healthcare facilities frequently. Now you may not be able to look this information up, but there are patients who will visit frequently. You can target OB-GYNs offices for pregnancy related check ups which are usually once per month, maybe more. Oncologist offices, possibly even pediatricians. The point is, get creative about where you would find your target audience and understand who would benefit the most from even an MVP release.

• A mix of patients who are technically savvy and some who are not

The most important part of an app is usability. Once you go to full production use of the app, it will be used by patients with a varied skillset. The intent of any app is to be usable by anyone so a good way to screen your test users is to ask them about their proficiency with technology so that you can ensure you are getting a good variety of skills during your release.

An important step in onboarding customers to an MVP is to properly set expectations. Expectations will let the customer know what they will experience in the app, what functionalities that they have, and how much feedback they need to provide. Without clearly defining these expectations, you may get customers that are frustrated with your product because they expected more capabilities.

Once you have your MVP and customers ready to go, now you can begin the exciting phase of testing and getting feedback!

Iterate on customer feedback and learnings

A successful MVP release is when you receive lots of feedback from your customers. This may not mean that they loved everything about it, but it means that they were engaged with your product sufficiently to provide meaningful feedback. Some of the feedback provided may be features you already know that will be in the release. Once you have this feedback, re-rank them. See what is the most common or what the customers are consistently stating. You may not be able to get all their feedback into the next release of the product, but you can use the feedback to build out the product roadmap.

In addition to feedback on the product, there’s also learnings you and your team can reflect on how you ran the MVP release cycle. Take some time to review those learnings, pivot if needed, and see what can be done to improve the process for your team and the product.

Communicate with stakeholders

Throughout the entire MVP process, you should be communicating with your stakeholders. That includes the customers that are part of the testing.

To your management, they need to be aware of what progress is happening for your product, how you are measuring your goals, and if any challenges arise, how they are being mitigated and managed. Establish a cadence for status updates, develop a format, and be consistent in providing the latest information thought the MVP cycle. Include how you are measuring up against the metrics you initially set for the release and if there are deltas, explain why.

To your customers, you may be updating the app during testing. You should let them know when new features or bug fixes are added. You should also keep in contact with them as reminders to use your product and to provide feedback. You’ll likely already have analytics built into your app (that should be a P0!), so you’ll know how frequently the patients are using the app. Provide the option for customers to fill out surveys or conduct user interviews to get more in-depth insight on their experience.

The MVP release may result in you needing to pivot on a few things, make sure you stay flexible and adapt when needed to changing customer requirements and feedback. Always keep your stakeholders up to date on these changes and keep an open mind for new requests and new experiences. Your MVP is what leads to a full product release. It does not have to be perfect, but it does need to be mindful of your goals and your customers. Use the feedback to develop a strong roadmap. By developing a strong customer focus, your product is bound to help your company grow.

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