Welcome to Defining your Minimum Viable Product or MVP. In this video we're going to talk about minimum viable products. What are they? The different types of MVPs and when to use the various kinds MVPs. This is one of my favorite lessons, as it means you're now at the point in your design strategy process, where your ideas are becoming a reality, which is incredibly exciting. So, let's get started. A minimum viable product or MVP is the most basic, rudimentary version of your product or service, that can be released to satisfy the early adopters in the market. It is effectively a version of your idea with the minimum functionality required in order for you to further test your hypothesis. It is of course not to be confused with most valuable player. It is also not to be confused with a prototype. A prototype is a tool to test the feasibility of your entire, or part of, your solution. It's not market ready, and not a solution that will attract early adopters. An MVP has to have enough value and purpose, that people will purchase the product or service, and that you can actually retain these early adopters. But it mustn't be over engineered so that you spend a lot of time and money building something that doesn't meet user needs. The MVP uses early adopters to gain product feedback, and refine your final product offering. As you gain feedback from your early adopters you will generally add additional features in a modular manner until you reach your full product offering. So what are the benefits of creating an MVP? Firstly, you can validate your understanding and assumptions on whether the product is needed, without expending the resources on a fully operational product. You can rapidly gain significant insights regarding the customer needs, and rapidly iterate your product in that direction. You are able to minimize the number of staff, funding and resources, your team or company need in these early stages. And lastly you will have a more robust product that will accelerate your go to market strategy, and increase your competitive advantage. There are a plethora of MVPs types. Some of the common types are: wireframes, mockups, explainer videos and landing pages. Wireframes are a visual outline of your product, they are generally used to articulate an idea, layout visual arrangement, or navigational system. They generally do not have color or any significant design work. Mockups are an extension of wireframes, but where design work is added to the wireframe context. Mockups however can add more realism to your MVP. So instead of just black and white outlines of an app on a smartphone for example, it may have some basic branding or colors added to it to be more interactive. An explainer video might not be a version of the proposed solution itself. Instead it explains how the solution works, the idea behind the solution, and what benefit the solution will bring to its users. Explainer videos can also be a cost effective way of getting your message out to potential customers, users, investors, consumers, and other stakeholders. A landing page is essentially a website placeholder that can inform people about your solution. That way you can tell them about a product or service and its key benefits and features that don't necessarily exist yet. You can also use your landing page to host an explainer video or mockups too. It can be a good idea to allow people to register their interest and that way you can measure demand for your idea at the same time. Software prototypes are usually a basic version of your envisaged solution if it's software based. This could be an introductory module for a piece of software, an app with just a few features, or a hub of a future hub and spoke solution. However it might be so basic that chances are your graphics interface and back end will still need some refining after launch. Before you commence development of an MVP you need to work out what you want, the product features, and the importance of each particular feature. The must-haves and the nice-to-haves. It's important not to bloat your MVP with unnecessary bells and whistles. Keep a minimum viable product true to its name, to the absolute minimum. To help you do this first document all the features or feature set of your product, list each of the features your product has. You'll probably end up with an incredibly long list as you'll have all of these great ideas of what you want to do that were generated through your customer research and prototyping. Next go ahead and prioritize the features in the must-haves and the nice-to-haves. Better still rank your priorities, but make sure you consider how the features interact with each other. From here you need to decide what type of MVP you want to create in order to test these key features, wireframes, explainer videos, basic software et cetera. Then it's time to get building and testing. One other tip. If you are going to outsource the development of your MVP instead of creating it yourself, be mindful of the intellectual property implications, and raise these concerns with the vendor before you get started. That brings us to the end of our lesson on Defining your Minimum Viable Product. By now you should have a good understanding of what a minimum viable product is, and its importance. Also, how to scope and execute your own minimum viable product. Good luck.
