A minimum viable product (MVP) helps product management teams validate their ideas and get their product to market faster. That can be a huge win for businesses working in a competitive market or needing to address an urgent customer requirement.
In this guide, you’ll learn what a minimum viable product (MVP) is and the essential steps to build one. We’ll also highlight some inspirational real-life MVP examples and show you how monday dev can help push your MVPs to market faster.
Try monday devWhat is a minimum viable product?
A minimum viable product (MVP) is the most basic version of a new product with enough functionality and features to appeal to early adopters and validate the concept early in the product development cycle.
The concept of an MVP comes from the Lean Startup methodology, which encourages learning and building with scalability in mind. According to its author, Eric Ries, an MVP is the version of a new product that allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least amount of effort.
Without validated learning, development stalls, or teams make decisions based on what-if scenarios that may not play out in the real world. But, with valid feedback, teams can work toward a final product or future upgrades for the product.
Building an MVP plays a central role in agile product development. It aligns with agile principles of releasing updates consistently, learning along the way, and prioritizing features based on user feedback.
What is the purpose of a minimum viable product?
An MVP aims to test an idea with real users before committing a large budget to the product’s full development, learn what resonates with the target market, and attract early feedback to iterate and improve the product.
It can help minimize waste, focus on learning quickly, and test fundamental hypotheses for the business model. The sooner you determine whether your product appeals to customers, the less effort and expense you spend on a product unlikely to succeed.
5 steps to build a minimum viable product
To build a minimum viable product (MVP), follow these five steps:
- Define the problem: Clearly identify the problem or pain points the product aims to solve and the benefits it will provide.
- Conduct market research: Gather information about the target market and your main competitors, and calculate the market size. The more information you have, the more likely you are to succeed.
- Map out user journeys: Understand how users will interact with the product. Consider creating a prototype for users to visualize a working solution before building the MVP.
- Prioritize the features: Define the essential features the MVP must have to address the identified problem. For example, consider using the MoSCoW prioritization method to define the “must-have,” “should-have,” “could-have,” and “won’t-have (this time)” features.
- Build, measure, learn (BML): Develop the MVP, release it to users, measure their interactions, and learn from their feedback.
Use these steps to ensure your MVP focuses on solving a specific problem for a defined target audience while minimizing the time and resources spent on non-essential features.
Try monday devReal-life minimum viable product examples
Looking for inspiration with your product development? Check out some tremendous real-life MVP stories from the companies below.
Amazon
Jeff Bezos started Amazon with a vision of creating an online store that sold everything. But to test the water, he built his MVP with a single product category: books. Back in the 1990s, the mega-retailer only sold books, and it didn’t even have a warehouse to pull them from. Bezos bought the books from a distributor and shipped them to the customer each time they placed an order.
That minimum viable product worked. People loved accessing almost any book they might want — often at a discount. Bezos used the proceeds and user feedback from his initial MVP to gradually add more categories, services, and functionality, like allowing distributors to list their own books, making payments more secure, and allowing buyer and seller feedback.
Groupon
Did you know that Groupon didn’t even start with its own content management system? The founders used WordPress to get their MVP to market as quickly as possible and only built out the site you know as Groupon once they saw some success.
Today, Groupon dabbles in deals for local retailers, hospitality companies, and entertainment options, but it also offers ways to save on national opportunities and e-commerce. It’s come a long way from an MVP niche site only the savviest savers knew about to becoming a household name.
The MVP version of Facebook — or “Thefacebook” as it was called — was super basic. Profiles didn’t allow much information, and people couldn’t share videos or images. It simply connected students via their college or class and let them post messages to their boards.
However, the idea was sound, and the MVP adopted by Harvard University students provided plenty of validated learning. That let the founders move forward with the social media platform, working through multiple development cycles and beta testing rounds to eventually make history with a game-changing social media app.
Spotify
Spotify launched to Swedish music bloggers, who beta-tested the MVP version and helped market it to the rest of the world at the right time. The original Spotify only worked on desktops, didn’t have a freemium version, and didn’t let users create playlists or share songs. It was missing many other features you might know and love today, but the minimum viable product was enough to provide a great experience for people who were hungry for a way to stream more music.
iPhone
The original iPhone launched in 2007 with limited Apple apps and no way for customers to download other functionality. It didn’t even have all the functions other phones had then, and early adopters didn’t consider it a flawless product.
They did, however, consider it revolutionary. Apple used the iPhone’s first iteration to determine whether consumers would adopt an on-screen keyboard, wanted browser capability on a mobile device, and carry a single device for all purposes. The answers it got are now evident, as the iPhone model became the foundation for almost all future smartphones.
Remember: Your MVP might not be the next iPhone or Facebook, but it could be a significant step in the right direction for your product or business. To make the most of the MVP method and develop a product strategy that works, you need a way for your team to work together quickly and agilely. Excellent product management software can help.
Try monday devHow monday.com can help push MVPs to market faster
Built on top of the robust monday.com Work OS, monday dev equips product and development teams with everything they need to plan, build, and launch new products in one place. They can connect with sales, customer success, and marketing teams to collaborate on product roadmaps, release plans, and customer feedback to ensure products get to market faster.
Collaborate and communicate efficiently
Utilize workdocs to write, share, and collaborate on your MVP. Prevent unnecessary emails and meetings by providing feedback directly on relevant items without toggling between tools.
Visualize your work with multiple views
With monday dev, you can choose how you want to monitor your MVP development progress. View project milestones, dependencies, and overlapping activities with Gantt charts. Or gain full transparency into your team’s development tasks with a drag-and-drop Kanban board. With over 27 different work views to choose from, you can keep track of every task, idea, and product update the way you want.
Easily manage sprints
From sprint planning and daily stand-ups to retro and sprint reviews, empower scrum teams to manage the lifecycle of your sprints from start to finish, tracking progress in one place with monday dev.
Quickly produce Agile reports
Using monday dev, you can design and customize real-time Agile reports, including velocity charts and burnup or burndown charts, to track progress on your MVP.
Seamlessly integrate with other apps
Whether you’re building a new product, gathering user feedback, or working on the next iteration of your MVP, you’ll likely use numerous apps. With monday dev, you can easily integrate with the tools you already use — such as GitHub, Jira, Azure DevOps, Gitlab, Bitbucket, Sentry, Zendesk, Zapier, Integromat, Webhooks, and Slack — to keep all your data in one place.
Easily automate repetitive tasks
Save time with 150+ pre-built, customizable automations to focus on work that matters. For example, “When an issue is created or updated in the repository, create an item and sync future updates from GitHub.” Or, “When status changes to something, notify someone.” Choose from predefined recipes or easily build an automation to fit your needs in just a few clicks.
Build your MVP with monday dev
With monday dev, you can build your MVP and manage your entire product roadmap in one place. Not only can your development team collaborate on ideas and plan each iteration, but you can also gather user feedback in real-time. The result is a top-notch product that gets to market quicker and receives the accolades it deserves.
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