How To Plan Your MVP?

How you can plan your MVP going through various stages?

It is always important to plan your MVP instead of launching it blindly without analyzing the key factor attached with its success or failure. Remember that an intelligent plan can bring happiness and prosperity in terms of financial gains while a bad or poor plan can turn the smoothly floating ship in the deep ocean. Following are the stage wise guidelines that will surely help you plan your MVP.

Stage 1- Is there a genuine gap between customers’ demand and the available products? (The Market Identification)

The first step towards planning your MVP is to check and identify whether there is a genuine gap between customers’ demand and the already available products in the market. This will set your direction at the very initial stage making things smooth and comfortable for you in terms of furnishing your product with the features that the users desire to have.

The next thing is to decide whether you have to strive for short term plans or head towards achieving the long term goals. We recommend you to go for the latter one as the short term plans have a shorter life. Analyzing the things in broader spectrum will surely hold and pull long term financial benefits and success for you.

Stage-2: Have you identified your upcoming users? If not, do it immediately.

After you are able to complete the market identification, the next thing is to design your product. Consider a scenario, you have a design in your mind your product should be based on and you simply transform your idea into a product and throw it in the market. Will it be able to satisfy the various types of users? Your answer will be obviously in negative…On the other hand, you make a thorough analysis of the competitors’ products and identify the features that are preventing the users from opening the app to its conversion into a purchase. In fact this is all about playing with customers’ minds. In addition to an attractive design, the app should be user friendly so that the consumer is lost into the world of imagination (utopia) considering him/her-self a kid chasing a butterfly in a beautiful garden full of flowers and ends up with a feel of satisfaction and achievement by placing an order…Sounds cool, yes it must be…

So you basically need to keep the following things in your mind at this stage:

• Who is going to use your product? (The category, your would-be customers fall in.)
• In how many steps your user wants to reach his destination (a simple form to fill and place the order or some very complicated and lengthy procedures that make things boring and irritating for the users)
• What would be the ending action? (a short and simply road always lead to the desired destination i.e an order for purchase brings a win-win situation for both users and seller)

Stage 3: Is your difficulties and achievements map ready for analysis?

Once you are done with stage 2 the next thing is to map the difficulties and achievements attached with using the app. Always keep it in your mind that “No pain, No gain”. For example suppose you are going to design and develop an app for Hire-a-car business that wants to provide its passengers with the facility of online booking.

Difficulty: problem in viewing the nearest available captain

Action: Book a ride

Achievement: check the nearest captain and book the ride immediately

This is always important to make a comparison between Users desired features and Users needed features

Stage 4: Are you ready to decide the features to be included in your MVP?

This is an important stage as it needs you to make a comparison between Users desired features and Users needed features. You must keep in mind that you have to create a balance between the two and your MVP should start with the Users needed features with an addition of some  (not all) desired features. You have to focus on the overall purpose of your product and therefore should go towards adding the features that lead you towards achieving your long term goals.

Stage 5: Prioritizing the features is rather better option in the last stage

Now that you have penned down all the features, the last stage of planning needs you to rank the features with high, average and low priority and on the basis of this comparison you will be able to decide which features should be added in your current MVP and which features would be a part of future releases.

Bottom Line

After going through the above five stages you will be able to throw your MVP in the market however the game is not over yet as you must go to collect the users’ feedback so as to add or less the features in your final product to get the maximum by utilizing minimum resources and this is what an MVP is all about.