Why Is MVP Important For Software Development Projects?
Product development can be risky. Even if you are pretty sure you did everything right, there are always doubts:
Will users like my product?
How will people react to my invention?
What if something goes wrong?
What if I invest all this money, and it doesn’t pay off?
Some people think that it’s only right to release the end version of the product onto the market. They forget though that this may take quite long, and meanwhile, the situation on the market can drastically change. To avoid all these risks, in software development, as well as in many other branches, there is such thing as an MVP – the minimum viable product, and Qubit Labs can tell you all about it.
What Is MVP in Software Development?
MVP (minimum viable product) is a product that has the smallest set of features that delivers customer value.
In IT, it is a new product or a website with sufficient features to satisfy early adopters. At this stage, it is important for developers to collect feedback from the product’s initial users so they can continue their work with more precision and understanding for the users’ expectations. After considering their response, they design and develop the complete set of features.
“…you should capture the fundamental essence of what you are trying to accomplish and build out the most basic version of your product or service that people are willing to pay for”, says John Rampton in his article.
How Do You Define an MVP For Your Project?
We have already established that an MVP for a software development project is a product with the smallest set of features to deliver customer value. But how do you define this set of features? How do you choose what is important at this very moment? When do you start working on the real product? We simply love this article on how you can define your MVP with Story Mapping that answers all these questions. In short, it breaks this process into five easy steps:
- First of all, look at your software development project and define the primary goal of your product.
- Step two is to define the main process a customer has to go through when using it. It may be comprised of several tasks.
- Next stage: make a list of features for each of these stages.
- Prioritize features inside lists.
- Finally, define the MVP based on the priorities – features on the top of the lists represent your MVP and the rest is a long-term vision of how to make the product better.
Why Is It Important to Start Software Development Projects With an MVP?
Let’s talk about an MVP’s role in your software development project and why it is so important. First of all, we must remember the three key characteristics of an MVP. It is supposed to have:
- Enough value for people to willingly use it or buy it initially
- Enough future potential to retain early adopters
- Sufficient regular feedback to guide future development
These features will help you as a developer understand if you are going in the right direction. The reaction to the initial set of the software’s features will show you if you properly understand the market and the people’s needs, what functionality should be developed more, and what can be dropped altogether. Experience shows that gathering insights from an MVP is less expensive than going all the way with product development, i.e. releasing a product with more features. Just because developing more features means more money and more risks if the product fails due to incorrect assumptions or for another reason.
Do not be scared by this process though. If you don’t feel confident enough to define an MVP for your project on your own, and you feel like you need help developing it, have Qubit Labs help you with this, using the extensive knowledge gained by years and years of software development.
