The Impact of MVP on Modern Business Strategies

In a rapidly changing world that constantly faces new challenges, answers must be delivered quickly and provide high business value for the company to assess the initiatives.

Modern companies need to adapt to satisfy the changing needs of their customers. They try to take advantage of new technologies to expand their business and meet customer expectations. For example, AI technology helps many domains in their digital transformation and boosts their services. In this evolving world, there’s no space for the waterfall approach.

If your company wants to stay on top of the market, it must follow the agile approach. You can’t provide innovative IT solutions or services without an agile mindset. Inspection and adaptation are keys that help you learn quickly and deliver frequently, providing the highest business value for your customers. But how should they be conducted effectively?

One of the leading techniques to develop a new product in the market is minimum viable product (MVP). It’s used to avoid costs and risks associated with developing the wrong product by verifying your hypothesis, reducing waste, and gathering customer feedback rapidly and frequently.

In this article, I present the main advantages of using MVP in a delivery process and some prompts on how to complete this process without failure from the IT provider’s view.

Understand Your Target Audience

You can start exploring your target audience by conducting benchmarking and target analysis. It’s crucial to recognize your competition and learn from their achievements, gaps, and failures as well.

Precisely determine your target audience and early adopters of the final product by understanding their needs. Keep focus on their current experiences, behaviours, and emotions. Remember that you must solve their problems and provide for their needs by delivering new or better business value.

Assess all insights to characterize your target audience. You can freely use some agile techniques for this purpose, e.g., empathy mapping, personas, customer journey mapping, Kano Analysis.

Define the MVP Scope

MVP provides the smallest set of features to deliver value to the target audience. You need to pick them carefully to delight your early adopters, figure out the answers for your hypothesis, and align your assumptions based on their feedback.

Provide these features in iterations planned with the whole development team. Keep focus on every iteration and don’t lose sight of the product vision. If you plan MVP correctly, it may lead to the viable product. Use techniques that accelerate MVP, such as visioning, product roadmap, and product backlog management.

Engage the Whole Team

You won’t achieve any success without engaging the whole team. The more immersed the team is in MVP building, the greater the chance you’ll achieve your goals.

Team members must share goals and take responsibility for the delivery. They need to have the abilities to conduct effective inspection and adaptation by validating the increments of MVP. Here are some techniques that may support the team’s daily work: backlog refinement, planning workshops, and retrospectives.

Gather Feedback

Gathering feedback from testing MVP with early adopters helps you understand your target audience and their needs better. It’s essential to gather feedback suitable to confirm or dismiss your hypothesis.

Plan your testing sessions consciously, and provide all necessary information to your early adopters to avoid confusion or a negative attitude. Establish personal relationships with them based on trust, respect, and appreciation. If possible, arrange one-to-one testing sessions.

Use some UX research tools for analyzing their behaviour and getting better insights. Tools and MVP testing scenarios must be prepared to align your goals in every testing iteration.

Align Features

Develop the feedback by spreading the feedback knowledge throughout the whole team. Then, revise and reprioritize MVP features and other supporting MVP artifacts that have been made—e.g., personas, Kano Analysis, and product roadmap. Aligning should be conducted when you get valuable feedback about MVP.

Publication Information: This article was published on the IIBA Analyst Catalyst Blog on 23rd January 2024: https://www.iiba.org/business-analysis-blogs/the-impact-of-mvp-on-modern-business-strategies/