New Product MVP Development approaches

   

Introduction

Building MVPs or Prototypes is nothing new. On the surface it looks simple - Create a hypothesis or a List of assumptions, Find the most critical assumptions, Build a prototype or experiment to validate these assumptions - rinse and repeat until you achieve the objectives - Risk Reduction or Feasibility Study. However, depending on the type of Project / Product, Organization and End-Users / Stakeholders the New Product MVP approach varies in two aspects: Product-Centric vs User-Centric [1].

Product-Centric Approach

For teams that do not have UX Researchers or Product Managers that can conduct user research or the market isn’t conducive for such exploration Product-centric is the way to go. Focus is to build a product assuming capabilities / features on platform(s) that might appeal to the market based on understanding or expectations of possible users. Once completed the Product is marketed to the widest possible audience in the hopes that users adopting the product will exhibit certain common characteristics. Based on the usage the product can be improved further. Obviously, the likelihood of the solution solving the assumed problem won’t be known until the product is launched and marketed.

Pros & Cons of Product-Centric

With Product-Centric approach teams can get started with product building right away without having to spend a lot of time on user research. However, there are numerous problems with this approach with the key problem being that churning out a product with a bunch of guessed features can be resource intensive. Especially, with everything being an assumption prioritization will be challenging. Since the product will be marketed to the widest audience possible marketing will be expensive. Additionally, to appeal to a large number of potential users, good UI/UX will be necessary across multiple platforms. Even with all the above efforts, the probability of the Product finding significant adoption is also very low as efforts have not been invested to identify the right “Product Champions” and understand the ‘actual’ user needs. If there is no market for the product, pivoting becomes a challenge with so much code to be re-written or discarded and can be significantly worse especially if the USP is a non-functional requirement like Security or UI/UX. Even when there is a significant market for the new product it is likely that the adopted users may not align on their needs or exhibit patterns which will affect decision-making such as platforms to build product and market the product respectively.

 

User-Centric Approach

For teams that do have UX Researchers or Product Managers that can conduct user research User-centric is the way to go. Focus of this approach is to build a product with capabilities or features that are confirmed to appeal to a subset of the audience based on feedback from Product Champion(s). Critical assumptions are validated through user research called “Problem Validation”, which means that there is strong ‘local’ initial indication about the existence of a problem before the product is developed, launched and validated in the market called “Market Validation”. The MVP product is marketed to an audience that closely exhibits the characteristics of the users (personas) on whom user research was conducted. This is usually referred to as the ‘Beach-head’ approach.

Pros & Cons of User-Centric

If user research points out that some critical assumptions about the needs (like USP) are not true then focus can quickly shift to other Product Ideas instead of pursuing a product that won’t have any market. Features and capabilities will have a greater probability of meeting the market needs since they have been validated on a smaller subset i.e. Product Champion(s). Since the focus is on a defined segment of users with characteristics that are closely related to the Product Champion efforts can be optimized such as selection of platform for product development and marketing plan. Similarly, UI/UX do not have to appeal to a larger segment of users as early-adopters will be fine with an ‘ordinary’ experience provided the core problem is solved by the product (Ex:-Craigslist). The only challenge with this method is finding professionals that can plan and conduct effective and insightful user research.

Trends

Typically, organizations with a rigid hierarchy adopt the product-centric approach. The top-level executives have a solution to a problem that they strongly believe has a chance of success. They may not be comfortable making decisions based on the findings of a User Researcher on a small subset of potential users. Either Product Champions are not considered or they are incorrectly selected i.e. these champions are not representative of the targeted users but are pseudo-users.

On the other hand, companies adopting user-centric approach, mostly product-based, empower teams with UX Researchers and Product Managers with the responsibility of researching user needs.

Category-Defining Products

Especially with new products with no competitors also referred to as “Category-defining Products” user research is a critical step that can make or break the success in reaching the market-fit. Since the lack of products or direct competitors for a new product strongly indicates the lack of a market, a user-centric approach will assist with surfacing the ‘real’ needs using a subset of potential users.

 

Conclusion

I have seen time and again multiple new category defining MVP products (hoping to disrupt the industry) failing to learn about the market needs because teams relied on their core strengths in engineering or marketing while failing to invest sufficiently in their lack of experience in understanding the needs of the users. They focused on a Product-Centric approach hoping to start with a few assumed user needs, launch and pivot continuously till market-fit was reached. However, I can assure you that even with an MVP (that is Product-Centric) one can surely run-out of time i.e. patience and resources without reaching market-fit. A strong user research plan, as in a User-Centric approach, will help drastically improve the odds of product success by quickly pointing out that there is no significant demand or a ‘real need’ for the plethora of solution or product ideas. With a User-Centric approach to MVP development teams can minimize their efforts and resources in exploring the market for solving a problem of significant scale and thereby expedite reaching market-fit for their product.

 

References

1.  Weigers K. E., Beatty J., Software Requirements 3rd Edition, Microsoft Press 
2. Image Source: https://www.newbreedmarketing.com/