What is MVP and why is it necessary?

Author: Tony Garth

Did you know that nearly 70% of startups fail? There are many reasons for this, from disharmony in the development team to a lack of product-market fit. And what’s more, there’s rarely a single reason why a startup fails.

According to CBInsights, there are 20 main reasons. You can check them out in the image below. Some may come as quite a surprise.

SOURCE: CBINSIGHTS.COM

In 2011, The Lean Startup by Eric Ries changed the history of startups by introducing several new concepts. The minimum viable product, or MVP, was one of them. The idea of an MVP is to get user feedback before developing the final product. This feedback helps you avoid failure.

In today’s IT industry, developing an MVP is common practice. It’s useful in the planning of a project or startup. If you’re planning to launch your own product, read to learn more.

The definition of an MVP

MVP is a minimum viable product, a basic version covering the product’s fundamental components and features targeting the core requirements and needs of end-users. MVP helps software engineers facilitate the development process. And this is one of the reasons why MVP is important. The product is then tested on the market to see if it has the potential to succeed.

SOURCE: REDHAWKRESULTS.COM

To perform this initial testing, the product only needs the most essential functionality. Anything beyond major functionality is not included. The MVP version is a tool to help determine the product’s potential. The MVP method can be used to develop any product, including mobile apps and websites.

What does "viable" mean?

Before diving too deep, let’s have a closer look at what "viable" means. Viability is about delivering enough value to users.

Ensuring the viability of the product is one of the key characteristics of MVP development. What a product does is much more important than how it does it. 60% of the functionality of the average product is not used at all. This functionality is unnecessary and is a waste of development resources. A viable product meets user demands by performing one main function.

The key to success is balancing "viable" and "minimum" to make sure you create a product that people will use. Here’s an example.

  • Problem your users want to solve: Find a good used car in Connecticut.

  • Minimum: A used car in front of a house with a "for sale" sign on it.

  • Viable: A fast website based on a scalable language (like Python) that has user profiles, a search field, messaging options, and notifications.

  • Minimum + viable: A list of offers manually collected from Facebook that include car descriptions, photos, and contact details of sellers.

    Read more - https://steelkiwi.com/blog/what-mvp-and-why-it-necessary/