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To be more agile when creating a project, whether in-house or for a company, working in iterations has several advantages: testing and validating hypotheses, identifying new user needs, and ultimately saving a lot of money.
So far so good, but once you've said that, several questions arise:
The MVP (or Minimum Viable Product) is a minimalist version of an innovative solution. It is used to validate the potential of a product or service on a small scale, and should enable you to focus on the real bread and butter of your users from the very first stages of your project management. Beyond the startup jargon, the MVP is a great way of limiting the effort involved in creating the value you want to bring to end-users. The objective: test a first version of a product by developing only the core functionalities (i.e. those that bring value) to save time and money.
Before implementing an agile MVP design method, you first need to adopt an agile mindset: go fast, focus on the essentials and keep things simple.
When you draw up your iterative schedule, tell yourself that your MVP must be brought to market in less than 3 months. After that, you may consider that you've spent too much time designing it, or invested too much money in its development.
From a technical point of view, the aim of an MVP is to be functional, not perfect. Don't hesitate to opt for the "home-made" approach, experimenting by hand with functionalities that don't need to be industrialized for the first version of the solution.
Here again, you need to think opportunistically, and not hesitate to use existing building blocks to focus on developing the unique and innovative elements of the solution, i.e. those that determine the value proposition.
We don't necessarily advise you to draw up your agile manifesto, or to pull out your favorite Kanban every time you need to make a decision for your business. In contrast to these 2 techniques, the MVP Canvas can be realized in a few simple steps and fulfills your main objective: to rapidly test your product or service in an incremental way.
The value proposition is the main benefit of your solution for its target.
Fundamental hypotheses are the 1-3 most urgent hypotheses to test (and validate) before you can continue developing your solution. You can formulate them by completing this sentence: "Our solution will only work if...".
These are the priority features to develop for your MVP, the ones without which you won't be able to validate or invalidate your fundamental hypotheses.
This is what you'll measure to define the success (or failure) of your MVP. Your metrics should be linked to your assumptions and core functionality. Depending on your solution, you might, for example, start with the number of orders placed over a given period, and set yourself a precise target:
"This hypothesis will be validated if we record more than 5 orders within 10 days of the MVP launch."
The iterative approach doesn't just lend itself to launching a start-up from scratch in a garage. Some intrapreneurial projects or product launches also follow this method, which enables (more or less) large companies to remain agile in their project management and make continuous improvements.
The aim of the POC is to ensure the technical feasibility of the product. Before launching Amazon's Prime Now, the question was whether the supply chain could deliver orders in under an hour.
Amazon therefore began with an initial development sprint of its "Prime Now" service for its employees, in the offices, to validate its feasibility. In addition to validating logistical coherence, this iterative, in-house approach enabled the company to benefit from qualitative feedback from indulgent employees to proceed with continuous improvement.
The ultimate objective of the MVP is to validate that a market exists for a solution before developing it fully, in other words, to verify that there is a demand and measure it in order to make the right decisions. The most effective way of carrying out this market study is to place the MVP in a restricted market to observe its use and measure the traction it generates.
Having validated the feasibility of Prime delivery, Amazon then carried out a second sprint, putting its offer online only for certain areas of London close to the warehouses. The aim of this sprint was to answer the question: would users in London be interested in the solution? Where would they be?
The prototype is, in a way, the tangible draft on which to validate the desirability of the solution.
At the launch of Prime, Amazon's web designers led their third sprint: the design of a basic landing page to introduce Prime Now and advertise it on Amazon's website. By analyzing traffic in parallel, the teams were able to gauge demand and localize it with a view to extending the service outside London.
There are many no-code tools that make MVP design as easy as possible for those who don't have a CIO, developer or product owner:
At NUMA, no-code has enabled us to automate most of the repetitive tasks associated with our training courses: participant registration and coach staffing, sign-offs, participant feedback, customer reporting, etc. Our CEO Anselme Jalon spoke to Radio Contournements about how no-code has enabled us to become an EdTech and gain significant agility, without recruiting a development team.
We're there! You've tested and validated your idea using the MVP method... To make the most of the time you've invested and take your project to scale, you now need to develop its final version, based in particular on the user feedback you've received. To ensure its viability, we also advise you to create and challenge your business model using the method detailed in this article.
To be more agile when creating a project, whether in-house or for a company, working in iterations has several advantages: testing and validating hypotheses, identifying new user needs, and ultimately saving a lot of money.
So far so good, but once you've said that, several questions arise:
The MVP (or Minimum Viable Product) is a minimalist version of an innovative solution. It is used to validate the potential of a product or service on a small scale, and should enable you to focus on the real bread and butter of your users from the very first stages of your project management. Beyond the startup jargon, the MVP is a great way of limiting the effort involved in creating the value you want to bring to end-users. The objective: test a first version of a product by developing only the core functionalities (i.e. those that bring value) to save time and money.
Before implementing an agile MVP design method, you first need to adopt an agile mindset: go fast, focus on the essentials and keep things simple.
When you draw up your iterative schedule, tell yourself that your MVP must be brought to market in less than 3 months. After that, you may consider that you've spent too much time designing it, or invested too much money in its development.
From a technical point of view, the aim of an MVP is to be functional, not perfect. Don't hesitate to opt for the "home-made" approach, experimenting by hand with functionalities that don't need to be industrialized for the first version of the solution.
Here again, you need to think opportunistically, and not hesitate to use existing building blocks to focus on developing the unique and innovative elements of the solution, i.e. those that determine the value proposition.
We don't necessarily advise you to draw up your agile manifesto, or to pull out your favorite Kanban every time you need to make a decision for your business. In contrast to these 2 techniques, the MVP Canvas can be realized in a few simple steps and fulfills your main objective: to rapidly test your product or service in an incremental way.
The value proposition is the main benefit of your solution for its target.
Fundamental hypotheses are the 1-3 most urgent hypotheses to test (and validate) before you can continue developing your solution. You can formulate them by completing this sentence: "Our solution will only work if...".
These are the priority features to develop for your MVP, the ones without which you won't be able to validate or invalidate your fundamental hypotheses.
This is what you'll measure to define the success (or failure) of your MVP. Your metrics should be linked to your assumptions and core functionality. Depending on your solution, you might, for example, start with the number of orders placed over a given period, and set yourself a precise target:
"This hypothesis will be validated if we record more than 5 orders within 10 days of the MVP launch."
The iterative approach doesn't just lend itself to launching a start-up from scratch in a garage. Some intrapreneurial projects or product launches also follow this method, which enables (more or less) large companies to remain agile in their project management and make continuous improvements.
The aim of the POC is to ensure the technical feasibility of the product. Before launching Amazon's Prime Now, the question was whether the supply chain could deliver orders in under an hour.
Amazon therefore began with an initial development sprint of its "Prime Now" service for its employees, in the offices, to validate its feasibility. In addition to validating logistical coherence, this iterative, in-house approach enabled the company to benefit from qualitative feedback from indulgent employees to proceed with continuous improvement.
The ultimate objective of the MVP is to validate that a market exists for a solution before developing it fully, in other words, to verify that there is a demand and measure it in order to make the right decisions. The most effective way of carrying out this market study is to place the MVP in a restricted market to observe its use and measure the traction it generates.
Having validated the feasibility of Prime delivery, Amazon then carried out a second sprint, putting its offer online only for certain areas of London close to the warehouses. The aim of this sprint was to answer the question: would users in London be interested in the solution? Where would they be?
The prototype is, in a way, the tangible draft on which to validate the desirability of the solution.
At the launch of Prime, Amazon's web designers led their third sprint: the design of a basic landing page to introduce Prime Now and advertise it on Amazon's website. By analyzing traffic in parallel, the teams were able to gauge demand and localize it with a view to extending the service outside London.
There are many no-code tools that make MVP design as easy as possible for those who don't have a CIO, developer or product owner:
At NUMA, no-code has enabled us to automate most of the repetitive tasks associated with our training courses: participant registration and coach staffing, sign-offs, participant feedback, customer reporting, etc. Our CEO Anselme Jalon spoke to Radio Contournements about how no-code has enabled us to become an EdTech and gain significant agility, without recruiting a development team.
We're there! You've tested and validated your idea using the MVP method... To make the most of the time you've invested and take your project to scale, you now need to develop its final version, based in particular on the user feedback you've received. To ensure its viability, we also advise you to create and challenge your business model using the method detailed in this article.
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