Why You Should Build Every New Product Feature Like an MVP
Making a mistake launching a new product feature is costly, and I’ve done it at least a dozen times. Never again.
We’re all familiar with the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) strategy. It mandates that we “fake” components of a new product by making many of its processes manual at first release. We do this for a few reasons:
- We want to get our product idea out to customers as quickly as possible, so we can validate its reason for being.
- We want to discover where the product is going to break, so we can focus our limited time and resources on de-risking.
- We want to determine how our customers are going to accept and use the product, so we can build out those features first.
There are other valid reasons for adopting an MVP strategy, like getting to revenue as quickly as possible, but those are the big three.
MVP isn’t a new concept, per se, but its adoption has exploded with the lowered barriers of entry brought about by the Internet and Software as a Service (SaaS).
What’s gaining traction now is the strategy of repeating the MVP process with every new feature, even down to every new version.
How do we do that?
