Minimum Viable Product : Least but not less

Startup companies nowadays are growing fast and rapidly. During my journey to become a developer in a tech startup, almost all of our releases created in not-so-a-long time, cause it had to be released as fast as possible so our users can use it.

Because of the tight schedules and limited resources, me — as a team coordinator, arrange the project to put usability in the top of all. We spend less time to design the pleasant interface and deep user research. We just think about making this feature achieve our company goal.

Once I thought that the product should be perfect and serve a pleasant experience for users. But regardless of it, we have to release our product to the real scope as soon as possible. So, we came up by developing MVP.

I thought that building an MVP would be a terrible way (since it’s not our max). But, building MVP rather than a full-fledged product is a better way to validate the idea. MVP is a great way to launch the product in a short time, especially for fast growing company. MVP is tested directly by the real users and the feedbacks that we got are based on the real cases. We can gain a lot of insight that we might not recognize in our product.

A big companies such as Uber, Dropbox, and Zappos started as MVPs. These examples prove the great impact of developing an MVP.

“All we did was we took a WordPress Blog and we skimmed it to say Groupon and then every day we would do a new post with the points embedded. It was totally ghetto. We would sell t-shirts on the first version of Groupon. We’d say in the right up, ‘This t-shirt will come in the color red, size large. If you want a different color or size, email that to us.” — Andrew Mason, Groupon Co-Founder

Thing we have to take note is :

Release an MVP doesn’t mean to create a half way to goal.

Our product must bring the users to their goals. The point is an MVP must be usable and enough to provide the main process. Hence, keep focus on the product’s value and improve it gradually to pertain the retention of your products.