The MVP Cheat Sheet: A Guide for Product Managers
So you have a great product idea in mind. But, will it sell?
In the old days, the only way to test if people want your product is to build and release a full product, and see if the market bites. This can be quite risky since it takes lots of time and money to do.
Fortunately, as a digital product manager you now have a much better options to test your product ideas in a faster and cheaper way. This is through what’s called the Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
In this article we’ll look at different types of MVPs, and how companies like Buffer, Dropbox, Amazon, and Spotify used them to test the market without breaking the bank.
What’s an MVP?
An MVP is the simplest form of your product idea that you can release to customers, to quickly learn about their response. It allows you to validate customers’ interest in your product, learn about their behaviour and needs, and do it all in a time and cost-efficient way. The MVP approach is often used in the agile methodology, where the product is developed in an iterative and incremental way. This allows for continuous testing, feedback, and improvement.
Types of MVP
There are quite a few types of MVPs you can use to validate your product ideas. Let’s have a look at a few well-known MVP types, along with the companies that successfully used them.
Landing Page MVP
A landing page is a single web page that explains your product's key features and advantages. It typically includes a call to action, such as joining a mailing list, wait list, or pre-ordering a product.
A great example of this is social media toolkit Buffer, who created a simple, but well-structured landing page to describe their product and pricing before the product was even ready. Their intention was to learn whether people would consider using, and paying for the product.
After receiving lots of good responses from potential customers through their landing page, they decided to start building the actual product. This experiment allowed them to gauge the interest of potential customers and make sure they were building something that people actually wanted.
Explainer Video MVP
A explainer video is a promotional and informative video that strategically highlights your product's features and advantages. This type of MVP is used to generate hype for the product and measure the market’s interest before investing significant resources into its development. For a better understanding of the explainer video MVP, a great example is to look at is how Dropbox used it.
Back in 2007, Dropbox founder Drew Houston released a 4-minute demo video of their product on the internet before it was fully developed. To their delight, they saw more than 75,000 people registering for their beta release overnight. This helped them justify enough confidence and business value to properly build their product. This approach allowed Dropbox to test the waters before investing a lot of time and resources into building the final product.
Fast forward to the time of writing, Dropbox now has thousands of employees with a total funding amount of $1.7B+.
Wizard of Oz MVP
The Wizard of Oz (WoZ) is a type of MVP that simulates a fully functional product, but in reality, the service is performed manually by humans behind the scenes. The name comes from the Wizard of Oz film, where the wizard is revealed to be just a person behind a curtain, controlling everything with special effects and tricks. Similarly, in a WoZ MVP, customers are given the impression that they are interacting with a fully automated system, when in fact, the service is done manually behind the scenes.
A well-known company who used WoZ was Amazon. Remember when Amazon used to only sell books? Well, that came from Jeff Bezos’ idea of an MVP, which consists of
Amazon.com website
A list of books
A person manually processing the orders
Whenever a book order is made, Jeff would buy a copy of the book from a bookstore, and ship it to the customer. As their sales grew, they had real proof that customers found their product worth using. Gradually their catalog expanded to include just about anything you can think of, and their system improved to include elaborate automation.
Prototype MVP
A prototype MVP is a bare-minimum, functional version of a product that lets customers enjoy the benefit of its core functionality before it’s fully developed. A prototype MVP is a working model of the final product, but it may lack some features or have a simplified design.
Spotify is a great example of this. Nowadays, Spotify is well-known for being the music player with sleek UI and advanced shared-playlist features. But obviously they’ve come a long way, and their app started off with much less features.
First launching their product as beta release, the Spotify prototype only streamed music, with no other features such as playlists or podcasts. After a highly successful beta release, they went on to start full-on product development. This allowed Spotify to test the core functionality of their product and gather feedback from users before adding more features.
Summary
MVP is a simple and cost-effective way to test your product idea in the market, and gather customer information and feedback before investing significant resources into development. As a product manager, an MVP should be a key part of your product discovery as it allows you to gather valuable insights, test the market and make data-driven decisions to ensure the success of your product.
Which MVP type you decide to use should align with the nature of your product and the type of feedback you’re after. Whether you decide to use one of the MVP types covered in this article, or even others not covered here, remember to go with the one that lets you to learn the most about the market and your potential customers.
———
Want to build better products? We can help.
Talk to us today to find out how we can provide the right approach for you.
Cover photo: unsplash/@lucabravo
