Plan Your MVP In A Day.

This process is part of the Agile Application Development MVP framework used for cloud-based development projects. Following these steps will help you identify and prioritize features and confidently determine what you need to market your MVP.

Step 1: Identify & Understand Your Business And Market Needs

The first step is to determine if there is a need for your product in the market. It could be an organizational need or a customer’s need to fill an existing void. It's important to analyze your competitors and establish how you can make your products stand out. This step will help determine the type of mobile product you need.

Long-Term Goals

Once you've identified a need for your product, you must set yourself a long-term business goal: what do you intend to achieve? For example, if you're a grocery store chain, you might have a long-term goal of reducing checkout times by 27%.

How To Define Success

Next, define what will determine the success of your product. For example, our grocery store chain can define success by reducing checkout time by 27%, having 250,000 monthly active users, and reaching $3 million in monthly transactions through their app.

Step 2: Design The User Journey(s)

It is crucial to design your app with the user in mind. Developing your app with the user in mind will allow you to look at your product from the user's perspective, starting with opening the app to reach an end goal, such as making a purchase. An excellent way to ensure that your users will have a good experience with the first iteration of your application is to map the user journey. This map provides insight into how you can design a user-friendly app. In addition, defining user flow and addressing what actions users need to take to reach the end goal ensures that you don't miss a thing while keeping user satisfaction in mind.

Things To Consider When Creating A User Journey:

Identify Users

Who will use your product? You can have more than one user category. For example, if you have a therapist appointment scheduling app, you might have an Appointment Scheduler (The Customer) and a Therapist.

Defining Actions (Tasks)

Tasks are actions that the user or users must take to get to the end of the story and achieve the goal. When planning your MVP, you'll probably want to research which users have the most tasks and focus on that user; however, there may be higher priorities, so you may need to focus on another user or even multiple users.

Identify The Story Endings

There will be a story ending for each user, which is the user’s goal (i.e., booking a therapy appointment).

Step 3: Create The Pain, Action & Gain Map

Once you’ve worked out the user flow, you will want to create the pain & gain map for each action. The pain and gain map allows you to identify all user pain points and the gains the user achieves when each is addressed. This strategy will enable you to identify where you have the most significant potential to add value. You can then focus your MVP on these areas while adding less impactful areas to your product roadmap for future releases.

I recommend organizing the pain and gain map in one table.

Step 4: Decide What Features To Build

You should be able to discern which features to include in your MVP and which features to include in the product roadmap has lower priority. Here are some tools to decide what features are essential to your MVP success. Ask what my users want vs. what my users need, which can help identify and prioritize features. Remember that implementing too many user-requested features too soon can impact the user experience and reduce the overall product goal. The only features you should include should be related to the general purpose of your product.

Opportunity Statements

Use opportunity statements to perfect the features you want to develop. For example, for renters who apply for a rental property, the opportunity statement "How can we speed up the rental application process?" can become "Reduce application processing time by 15%". At this point in MVP development, you’ll want to generate signature phrases.

Analyze Features To Include In Your Product Roadmap

List the user and the specific opportunity statements, and provide a breakdown of the features to include in the product roadmap.

Prioritization Matrix

Using the preference matrix, you can decide what needs to be included in your MVP and what features might be included in later releases. This step helps you determine where you can have the most impact relative to the urgency of the feature. Below is the recommended format for your MVP preference matrix.

At this point, you should have a solid foundation for planning a minimum viable product. You have identified and understood the needs of your business or customers. In addition, you’ve addressed the weaknesses and have decided on the features to be created and their priority. Now you can focus on marketing your MVP.

After Your MVP

After launching your MVP, you must collect feedback from your users. Users tell us where the product is lacking and ensure market validation. This feedback will help you generate new insights based on user behavior research that will shape the subsequent versions of your product. The key is to keep testing, learning, measuring, and re-testing until the product is finalized.