Developing Minimal Viable Product.
As an entrepreneur or startup founder, one question that often comes to mind during business early formation is “How best to determine what Minimal Viable Products should be, so as to avoid complexity”.
In order to ensure an effective and marketable minimal viable product (MVP), it is important to ensure such MVP encompasses both your unique value proposition (UVP) and minimum marketable features(MMF). Your UVP makes you stand out, while your MMF makes your product easily accessible to the market.
Thus, if your product or service isn’t standing out among competitions in your industry, no matter how minimal your viable products are, the chances of its survival through market penetration is narrow. The same thing applies to lack of MMF, when you have UVP without MMF tailored to customer needs, the chances are that your products wouldn’t survive through the market penetration phase.
Hence, developing MVP which stands the chance of penetrating through the market, involves a combination of both your UVP and MMF. Irrespective of whether your UVP is a product, services, marketing channel, the most important thing is that your UVP and MMF should always be core features of your MVP. Such core features are by default minimized when you places focus on:
- Solving the core market problem or needs.
- Restricting features to “THE MUST HAVE”.
- Making your UVP pronounced within your market niche.
It is also noteworthy to take notice of gaps avoidance prior to MVP test deployment phase. Major known gaps are:
- Knowledge Gaps.
- Align Gaps.
- Effect Gaps.
While developing MVP, it is important to have detailed knowledge required to provide or offer the best product or services. When the knowledge gap of what customers need is lacking in your product or service, by default your chances of penetrating the market would be slimmer. The Same thing applicable to both Align and Effect gaps.
Align gap is the gap responsible for procedural steps toward the use of your product, and thus you want to ensure your products are simple to use via simple procedure, as complexity in product useage or maintenance can discourage customers and thus by default its scalability within market space. A textile company that manufactures clothes, without stating its composition or detergent composition required for its washing or maintenance, no doubt would suffer from an alignment gap.
Effect gaps describe the effect of your product on your customers. Thus, you want to ensure any form of negative impact of your products or services on customers are mitigated. A clothing brand in china with no accurate dimensioning information for her customers in Europe, Africa, America would suffer from not only Effect gap, but also Align gaps as customers from those regions of the world would most likely return any purchased cloths with wrong size dimensioning.
As soon as various gaps are cared for, the use of pareto principle can be introduced toward phase deployment of your service or products. This involves deploying your MVP with 80% of your product core features for the initial phase, while the other 20% can be implemented over a period of time along with feedback to optimize your products and solutions.
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