One of the greatest challenges for Product Management is the creation of a minimum viable product (MVP). The discipline of building out an offering that delivers value to customers as quickly as possible, while also setting a technical foundation for making a multi-year vision reality, is a competency that is hard to come by. As a product leader, I have seen how easy it is for the scope of a minimum viable product to expand such that the delivery in a competitive timeframe is lost. It’s so common that I gave up on the standard designation of MVP and really put the emphasis on minimum by visually abbreviating it as mVP. This always draws a laugh and serves as a reminder for the team throughout the process.
How do you define the mVP?
You do it in partnership with your architecturally minded engineers. First, systematically gather requirements from existing customers who are prospects for a data solution. With discipline, create a matrix of the business issues they are facing, rank the impact of addressing those issues and write up a set of technical requirements that need to be met over time. You’ll want to bucket your features in a business value / implementation matrix:
Part of the exercise is to assess at a high-level the order in which you deliver and which features have to be built on foundational elements. Of course, be practical. If the highest priority from customers is an alerting system that notifies them it’s time to take action, however the core data isn’t structured, the alerting will have to be built in a later phase. Listen to your architects who will share some of the big challenges of delivering performance working with large data sets and productize accordingly. Also, strive to include some sizzle early in your delivery of value schedule.
As you rank the build order, consider what functionality delivers the greatest value for prospective customers. And, remember to assess what delivers the greatest financial opportunity for your business. If a data solution is part of a portfolio of offerings as it often is, understanding how the portfolio offerings can be positively impacted by your data solutions is a winning approach that can build esprit de corps across the lines of business.
Set the vision and build waypoints delivering value in the mVP and beyond
Everyone likes to win. Make each release of functionality a win rather than setting a goal that will take many months to achieve. Depending on your situation – is your business a public company or private – you’ll have less or more flexibility to lay out a big vision to the early customers. This is an issue of revenue recognition, of course. If you’re in a private company, you can share more of your vision. There are greater constraints in a public company. Consider your price target and pricing model early as it can be difficult to raise a price down the road. Practice not over-committing in your customer conversations. Instead, talk about functionality you know will be more challenging to deliver as part of your vision without a timeframe commitment.
It’s important to talk through the vision with architects early on, as the choices they make for implementation can facilitate the ability to deliver more capabilities or may end up requiring a rebuild that slows down delivery of value because early choices were short-sighted. Engaging in dialog about the phased delivery and being open to some compromise builds trust. Ultimately the innovation snowballs to benefit of customers and the business alike.
This post looks at taking the product vision and making a practical phased delivery starting with an mVP. There are many articles on the core elements of creating a product vision. Here’s one that resonates with me (I am a Product Board user). https://www.productboard.com/blog/write-product-vision/