Post the prototype stage in the product development process, the minimum viable product (MVP) is meant to test of product’s ability to solve a problem.
Making hypothesis
A startup is nothing but a solution to a problem of a customer. Naturally, the starting up process starts with finding a pain point of a customer/s.
When the problem statement is finalized, certain assumptions or “hypotheses” of the problem are made, upon which the validations are to be made. If the hypothesis is successfully validated, it can be further developed or associated with the final product. If not, the hypothesis gets rejected & new ones are built.
Hypothesis testing
These hypotheses are tested by minimum viable products or MVPs.
MVPs can be as simple as a button in your existing web-based solution or newly developed “minimum” product. Depending upon the complexity of the hypothesis, the time required to launch and get results from MVPs differs.
The sole purpose of MVPs is to test a product to the market in the quickest way possible before building a full-fledged one. Once the MVP has been successfully tested, the risk of failure is reduced and startups can go ahead with the actual development of the product.
A lesson that I’ve personally learned is to keep the MVP bounded by time, along with features. This has helped us reduce the time investment.
MVPs assure product development and enhancement with a minimum cost of money, time, and resources.
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