Minimum Viable Product (MVP) – With which minimum features you should launch your app?

The world as we know it today is, among many things, competitive. Once you set foot out in the streets, you are likely to be overwhelmed by the seemingly endless array of choices. Each unique from the other, each attempting to captivate the common passerby. Simply, being a result of changing customer behaviors. People nowadays barely even spare a minute or two glancing over a product before moving on the next. The above is especially true when it comes to mobile applications.

Therefore, today’s market sets new requirements that companies would like to meet. In the world of mobile applications, understanding what customers need from your product is highly important to survive in the market. And, this is exactly what a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) does to your business. 

But what exactly is an MVP? It’s essentially a development technique where a new product or website is launched primarily with sufficient features to satisfy early adopters. Only after taking feedback does the final and complete development and design are taken into action.

A minimum viable product mainly refers to producing an actual product, with a bare minimum of features, that can be offered to a customer and proceeding by observing their behavior of the product or service. Having an MVP is beneficial for understanding the customers’ interest in your products without fully developing the product itself. Allowing you to find out whether your product will actually appeal to the consumers, without the effort and cost of making a fully functioning product. Monitoring the consumer responses has been found to yield much more reliability compared to asking them directly. 

Now, what features should you include in your MVPs?

The Problem

It would be ideal to start off with realizing what problem is it that your app can solve. Afterward, focus on showing the consumer what they need to do to overcome these given problems. 

The Information

Following that should be the act of writing down information to guide the customer thoroughly. Creating an atmosphere where it appears as though each step is crossed by making a decision.

For example, in making a food delivery app, the first decision would be to select a restaurant, this decision will point out information that the customer will find helpful like the name, location, menu items, prices, reviews, etc.

The Potential

Once these two measures are taken care of, your next course of action would be to list out potential options for features that the final app will have, comprehensively depending on what the customers want. Accordingly, this will create inspiration for you to create a list of possible features for your application via turning the actions and information into specific features.

The Needs

After having a full set of features, enough to make an application that is possible to hand over to your audience, the app will need to be constructed consisting of the mission-critical features. These are the features that are 100% necessary for completing tasks for your app.

It is important to separate the needs and the wants, and filter and prioritize the features that can be assembled with ease and minimum resources. Keeping the risk at a minimum, so as some functions are too difficult to sew into a program, the developers are more likely to waste time on it and inevitably break the budget.

Once the stepping stone is in place, the customer may now accomplish the main objective set by the app to achieve. Hereafter, you must decide on the new features that will make the user experience easier and more intuitive. These features will relate to the information gathered from the consumers as they use the app initially. 

With that said, it is vital to understand that an MVP is not at a level to be a paid product, it can only be used to provide you with valuable feedback coming directly from a known audience. Knowing this, none should spend their resources on branding or sales and marketing-related features of the product, like monetizing the app with ads. 

Keeping all this in mind, your MVP should be simple as its only purpose is to test your ideas and your assumptions. The MVP should only include enough features to fully address your customer’s quarries or needs. Once the MVP is approved by you to be improved upon, you can add advanced functions to engage tour users more. 

Once it is confirmed what your Minimum Viable Product should and shouldn’t have, you’ll be ready to launch. You will even carry a clear set of potential features in mind for the future. When ready, you’ll have created the best possible version of the initial stage of your product that will attract the maximum quantity of early adopters and create momentum, giving you the best chance for success.