The role of IT leaders is to align their efforts with vision and the strategy of the organization, striving to find and implement the right technology solutions that supports them. Most of the time IT Teams procures off the shelf solutions which are ready made products developed by software vendors and can be implemented and used in a short amount of time. Where off the shelf solutions might satisfy general needs and requirements it becomes very difficult to find niche business applications that might be required only for specific organizations.
This is where IT Usually turns to developing their own technology products from the ground up. A process that historically has been very problematic. Going back to the traditional development process an enterprise might go through; typically, by the time needs are identified, requirements are gathered from various stakeholders, specs are created, coding, testing and launching is complete, the entire process might have taken a couple of years or more and the initial requirements might, the processes and the business landscape might have changed rendering the efforts useless. This is where the need for MVPs rose.
An MVP or a minimum viable product is a basic version of the final product with only the essential bare bones functions. MVPs allow organizations building their own products to only build the core of the product which they can then test in the market (whether internal if the product is employee facing or externally if the product is customer focused) to see whether or not it has the potential to succeed. With the MVP and testing in-place IT teams can collect valuable feedback and insights that would help them further fine-tune the product or in some cases change change the development direction completely.
image source: SteelKiwi
Popularized by Eric Reis in his book the Lean Stratup the concept of MVP became very popular with starts and later adopted by Enterprise Organizations due to the following benefits:
To build an MVP you should properly define it, some questions you can ask to help you are:
Although the idea and concept of a Minimum Viable Product looks pretty simple, many companies still misunderstand it. Some of the main issues are:
As we talked the Minimum Viable Product allows you to gain valuable insight about your idea from users with very little efforts allowing you to maximize your budget as a result. Any organization with a considerable push to developing their own products should consider having an MVP because it gives them the opportunity to test the product with actual users in the real market and obtain the necessary early feedback that makes the different between success and failure.
Interested in starting your own product development efforts but are lacking the required resources? Sprintat is an offering where we provide you with a complete Agile Development team alongside the tools, processes and quality controls required to help you build, maintain and continuously optimize your software products/solutions. Sprintat helps you build applications your users will love using.
