What is a minimum viable product (MVP)

So you have an innovative product idea—great!  Turning that idea into a minimum viable product (MVP) gets your idea to market ahead of your competition, while using as few company resources as possible. Strip away everything but the core features your product needs to function and engage users, until you have an MVP you can ship that will resonate with users—and prove that your idea has business value.

“Unlike a basic prototype that may be created to validate product decisions, an MVP is an actual product built with ruthless prioritization and with intentionality to its scope," explains Tom Lowry, Director of Advocacy at Figma.

What does a successful MVP look like?

The minimum viable product concept came from Lean Startup, a methodology that aims to help startups save resources and hit the ground running. According to the Lean Startup methodology, an MVP has four key traits:

1. Affordable to produce and replicate
2. Distills a main idea and makes it obvious to potential users
3. Solves a problem or adds value to the user’s life
4. Adaptable, leaving room for future design builds

3 benefits of a minimum viable product

Both emerging businesses and established organizations use MVPs to accomplish three key objectives.

1. Save time and costs.

Building an MVP helps minimize up-front product design and development costs, including time, energy, and budget. "MVPs save money, reduce financial risk, and gain value that can be injected back into the company in the form of data,” Tom explains.

Startups have more riding on MVPs than established companies. "Heavyweight companies with name recognition and capital to spare won’t crater if a new product goes to market and performs poorly," Tom notes. "But startups must align their product development with their risk reduction policy. You have to be really selective to manage your engineering resources."

Clarifying priorities helps businesses make tough decisions about where to invest. "In an article from Feedough comparing an MVP to a beta product, they use a pyramid diagram to show priority tiers, starting at the bottom with Useful, then up a level to Viable, and Delightful at the top," Tom says.

"You can expend a lot of time and resources trying to make a product a delightful experience—but if it’s useless, it’s a major waste. It’s better to learn from an MVP if a product works and if it’s viable before you make it delightful.”

2. Get real-world user feedback.

By design, an MVP isn't meant to be perfect—the goal of this proof of concept is to get feedback as quickly as possible. "When your concept becomes more than a prototype, you’re actually trying to build the thing to get real-world validation from users—without investing too much before you’ve proved your direction is valuable," says Tom.

So instead of finessing an MVP to be an immediate hit in the marketplace, Tom recommends designing it to gather valuable insights from actual users for future improvements.  "If you’re building an MVP, you want to have in-product metrics and data to track," he says. "Are people using the feature? How many times are they using the feature? How did they discover it?"

3. Fuel innovation.

With MVPs, teams use learn-as-you-go product development and product management to find unique, creative, innovative solutions. "Instead of perfection, designers are encouraged to seek out innovation with MVPs," Tom says. "With much less to lose, they have room to roll up their sleeves and let the creativity flow. At Figma, that's how we figure out our unique approach and differentiate ourselves from other design tools."

Designing an MVP isn't a blue-sky creative exercise, because there are real-world constraints of resources and release date to consider. But according to Tom, those constraints can help focus design and dev team efforts.

"When you have to deprioritize nice-to-have features, it breeds creativity," he says. "You have to be intentional about where you spend your time by going back to your core goals. If your time investment isn’t contributing to those goals, you can decide to invest that time later."

3 steps to build an MVP

The MVP creation process is an abridged version of a longer product design and development process. "You’re making a real product—it’s just pared down because it's the first thing you’re going to market with," says Tom. "If it doesn’t go well, you need to rethink the problem. If it does go well, you get a lot of direction about what you need to do next."

One proven method to build a minimum viable product is an iterative 3-step process from the Lean Startup methodology known as the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop.

1. Build. A UX or product designer fleshes out a product concept by running an experiment to test a product hypothesis. This hypothesis may center around a specific user group's needs, such as: “First-grade teachers want classroom tools that give young learners as much interactivity as possible.” Designers would then build a minimalist software prototype to test this hypothesis with design research.
2. Measure. Once the experiment has been completed, product teams interpret information gathered using key metrics, analytical tools, and data tracking. Using our earlier classroom example, the experiment might indicate that digital whiteboards helped increase student participation. With further analysis and data tracking, you might find that increased participation boosts learning retention over time.
3. Learn. A business’ ability to respond to user input at the “learn” stage helps determine MVP success. To learn, teams must ask themselves honest questions in response to feedback. Did they accurately assess the nature of a problem? How useful was their prototype in solving this problem? Did product use reveal any unexpected problems? Once the team has gained insights from MVP users, they can incorporate that data into their next iteration.

The team will then build, measure, learn and repeat as needed. "A product is never finished, and is only shipped because of deadlines," explains Tom. "There are infinite opportunities to add value by starting the loop anew.”

MVP pro tip: use a prioritization matrix

"At Figma, our professional design community develops MVPs using tools like this prioritization matrix," Tom says. "A prioritization matrix helps your team identify high-urgency, high impact features versus low-urgency, low-impact features across current and future versions of your product. This makes it easier to decide which features to include or delete in your MVP, so designers can get to work sooner to create, evaluate, and solidify priority MVP features."

Add value to your MVP with Figma

Minimum viable products showcase strategic thinking and creative problem-solving. When you work with Figma's online collaborative whiteboard, you bring everyone in on the game—UX designers, product managers, and whichever collaborators you need to make your next iteration a hit.

Whether you’re a solo designer, a promising new company, or a major business looking to refresh your development process, Figma’s prototyping tools and website prototype template help you design and try out concepts before building and launching your MVP.

With Figma, you can run experiments with target customers, set MVP feature priorities with your team, and use research templates to gather and incorporate user feedback into your design.

Ready to imagine, test, and build better MVPs with Figma?

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Sources

[1] http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/03/minimum-viable-product.html