Step-By-Step Guide To An MVP Product Design (With 6 Best Practices)

Imagine you’ve finally launched your app; initially, everything seems perfect. Soon after, users started to complain. Their feedback reveals that your product lacks the very features they expected. You’re devastated. If only you’d spent more time designing a minimum viable product (MVP) before launching! MVP product design can help you create a lean app version with only the most essential features. This lets you gather user feedback on your app before fully developing it.  In this article, we’ll walk you through the product design process for MVPs and share best practices for making your MVP successful.

NUMI's product design services can help you create a solid MVP for your next product. We specialize in helping startups and established businesses design successful products by uncovering and validating user needs. 

What is an MVP (Minimum Viable Product)?

A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is just what it sounds like. It includes only the bare minimum functionality needed to bring a product to market. That is why, in recent years, the concept of a minimum lovable product (MLP) and pursuing customer lovability has emerged as a more holistic approach that contradicts an MVP. This guide covers the history of the MVP and its advantages and disadvantages. 

A Versatile Approach

The reported goal of the MVP is to accelerate learning in the early stages of product development with minimal investment of money and resources. Nevertheless, the concept of an MVP can also be applied to existing products to determine whether a new feature set is valuable to customers. 

An MVP typically starts with asking, “What is the cheapest and fastest way we can start learning?” Creating an MVP allows us to determine whether a product has the potential to succeed quickly. 

The Minimum Viable Product

This way, companies can make a more informed decision about when to persevere and abandon an idea. The word minimum is essential. You need to deliver enough value that early customers want to use the product, can imagine what will be possible, and provide useful feedback for future product development.

Examples of MVPs 

The MVP isn’t just a testing ground or prototype that gets dismissed in the long run. Plenty of products and services on the market started as MVPs and expanded into institutions in their own right. 

Amazon 

In the early 90s, Jeff Bezos read that the e-commerce industry would be the next big venture in sales and took the opportunity to discover which markets would be most successful. He eventually landed on a bookstore as the minimum viable product, which he ran from his garage. 

The success of his bookstore led to the demand for other products, such as:

• Electronics
• Clothing
• Shoes

His first step, using books as the MVP, gave him the customer insight to take Amazon to the next level. Who would have thought that a small bookstore on a primary webpage would expand to the third-largest enterprise in the world in just 20 short years? 

Spotify 

In 2006, streaming services started and failed repeatedly due to limited and low-quality libraries, high subscription prices, and unstable streaming. So Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon built Spotify as a landing page where they could test their streaming technology with beta users and fund it with on-page ad revenue. 

Their ultimate goal was to make playback fast and stable so they could convince music labels and investors of the product’s quality. Once they had passed market testing, Spotify and its subsequent app were released to the public, becoming the streaming behemoth we now know. 

Dropbox 

When Dropbox launched in 2008, cloud stage had been in use for a while, but small businesses were still getting up to speed. For their MVP, the founders of Dropbox created this video MVP explaining how their product worked. 

Step-By-Step Guide to an MVP Product Design

Identify the Customer Pain Points

What problem are you trying to solve? Let’s get into the minds of Uber founders Garret Camp and Travis Kalanick from 2008. Let’s say you are attending a conference in a big city, and you notice it can be difficult to hail a cab late at night or in bad weather. 

So, you want to build a solution where you can just use your phone to get a ride home. You talk to potential users and ask them what their preferences are:

• Do they expect to hail a cab at the touch of a button?
• Would they be comfortable texting a taxi driver to get home?
• How do they prefer to pay for their ride?

This way, you research the market to understand who would use your solution and what they would expect.

Market research to develop an MVP can include:

• Competitive analysis
• Opportunity and SWOT analysis
• Surveys, 1:1 interviews, and focus groups
  

Validate your research and interview results with data to better understand your customers’ needs and pain points. This process will help you:

• Identify the minimum features your product needs to provide value
• Gather compelling testimonials to use as proof of concept during the investment stage

Based on their preliminary research, Camp and Kalanick developed UberCab, the first edition of the popular Uber app we know today. The MVP was based entirely on SMS, allowing users to call a cab through a simple text. The rest, as they say, is history.

Describe the Competitive Landscape

If the year is 2006, your cab-hailing service has few competitors. But in 2023, ride-sharing services are abundant, with plenty of overlap from app to app. What will make your service stand out? What are customers still missing out on? And what’s the monetary value of those pain points to the customer? 

Come up with a list of pros and cons showcasing how your service performs better than the competition.

Test the MVP for Validity

Identify a beta group or internal testers from your team who can give the basic technology a try, whether:

• A landing page
• SMS line (like early Uber)
• Basic one-page app

Stick to deadlines and have your testing team focus on the functionality and the ability to solve pain points. This will help you ideate and understand where to improve and refine the product before you launch it to early adopters.

Get Ready to Launch

If your MVP gets past the testing stage, congrats! You’ve got something special. Now it’s time to:

• Research
• Build
• Test
• Fix
• Launch
• Continue ideation

Once you’ve solidified the few features you identified, you can launch the MVP to your first customer base and kick off the build-measure-learn (BML) feedback loop. Through various iterations, we’ve seen Uber expand way beyond the MVP to include:

• Pooled rideshare
• Accessible ride options
• Some small markets, even helicopters 

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What Are the Benefits of Using an MVP Product?

An MVP product design helps you focus on your product's value proposition. Defining an MVP means constantly asking, "Will the work we're about to do inform the viability of our value proposition?" 

Starting with an MVP forces you to define your value proposition:

• Clearly
• Concretely
• Narrowly

It forces you to examine the breadth and depth of your vision and define exactly what value you want to provide to your ideal customer. You can then set clear targets, decide what needs to be developed to test your value proposition, and spend your time and money efficiently. 

An MVP Reduces Rework

Building extra features on top of your core product may cloud the value proposition and complicate the initial user experience for early adopters. Good research and design reduce the risk of building unwanted features, but there needs to be a substitute for testing your product in the market. 

Prioritize Validation

Doing extended development of an unreleased software product is building a tower of hope on a foundation of assumptions. Customers may or may not want your core product. Building just enough to validate your hypotheses means that if rework is necessary, your amount of rework is minimal. 

When you keep your initial product release minimal and your subsequent releases incremental, you'll be more nimble and responsive to the market. 

An MVP Creates Relationships with Customers Sooner

Considering the technology adoption lifecycle, you should target your MVP at early adopters. Instead of building all the features that the early or late majority might expect, create an MVP for early adopters and build customer relationships sooner. 

Early adopters are more likely to provide feedback on desired changes or additions, helping you validate your value proposition sooner. This feedback can also help you create a smarter, market-informed product roadmap. 

Early adopters also love to talk about great things they find, so targeting them can help you market and create a community around your product. 

An MVP Brings Focus to Critical Business Functions

Bringing your product to market sooner means testing your marketing approach and sales channels earlier, too. It's important to remember that a fantastic product may only get traction in the market if your marketing and sales are good. Testing all business functions end-to-end means that you can also test your business model assumptions on customer acquisition cost and lifetime value.

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3 Best Approaches for Testing and MVP Product Design

1. Websites and Applications: A Smart Place to Test Demand for a Product

One of the simplest methods to test demand for a product is to create a website for it and then buy traffic to that website. The website is not fully featured but a mockup explaining what will be available and inviting customers to click for more information. The number of clicks is compared to visitor numbers to determine the amount of interest in the product.

2. Services: Testing Demand for a Service

If you sell a service, the easiest way to test it is not to build the service delivery product but to perform the service for someone and measure how much they would be willing to pay. This can be done multiple times to measure this willingness accurately.

3. New Features: Testing Demand for a New Feature

Before developing new features for an existing product, it might be sensible to advertise the feature on an existing website and provide a link for more information. The link explains that the feature is currently under development. Again, a measure of clicks to visitors will deliver a reasonable understanding of the need for such a feature before development commences. 

6 Best Practices & Tips for an MVP Product Design

1. Validate Your Idea First

 A successful app MVP needs to meet your users’ needs. The best way to do that is to validate your idea before building your MVP. While your MVP is an idea validation tool, you should still independently validate your idea before committing to its development. And there’s a good reason for that. 

According to a CB Insights report, having no market need is one of the top reasons startups fail. So, getting to market with a validated idea is essential. The best way to do that is through product discovery, which is researching your market and validating your product idea before developing it. 

Uncovering User Needs Through Discovery

And discovery goes hand in hand with building an app MVP. It includes activities like:

• Market research
• User research
• Competitive analysis
• Wireframing and prototyping

When you do discovery, you get a deep understanding of your users’ needs and pain points. And more importantly, you will know how your product can meet those needs.

2. Analyze Your Competition

You must know your competitors' actions to build a successful app MVP. And that’s where competitive analysis comes in. Analyzing your competition will help you better position your app on the market and understand how to differentiate your app. That will also show you if you have achieved product-market fit, which is essential for your app’s success.

3. Prioritize Key Features

Correctly choosing your features is key to your MVP’s success. For instance, Pendo found that 80% of features in an average software product are rarely or never used. But how exactly can you do that?

First, you must develop a list of features you want your product to have. Then, ask yourself questions like:

• Does this feature meet our users’ needs?
• Is it technically feasible?
• Do our competitors have this feature?
• Is it aligned with our broader business goals?

If you’re doing product discovery, insights from your user research will help you answer these questions.

4. Use Agile Methodologies

Using Agile methodologies is key when you’re building an MVP. Using them allows you to adjust to changing requirements and be flexible during development. And that’s essential when you’re building an MVP. 

But what does an Agile team look like? Which methodologies should you use? Agile teams are cross-functional by design, and your team should include the following:

• Software engineers
• Designers
• Product managers
• QA engineers

Choosing the Right Agile Methodology

There are several Agile methodologies to choose from, such as:

Scrum Kanban Crystal Extreme programming (XP): Your choice will depend on your team’s preferences and your MVP’s requirements. The most popular Agile methodology is Scrum, with 81% of agile teams using Scrum or a Scrum hybrid.

5. Create a Feedback Loop and Iterate

Collecting and iterating on user feedback is crucial for your MVP’s long-term success. The stats prove it, too—77% of users view brands that collect and accept feedback more favorably. Creating a feedback loop is the best way to maximize your users’ feedback. The sooner you get to the feedback loop, the sooner you can give users what they want.

6. Plan for Future Scaling

Building an MVP is just the first stage in your product's lifecycle. It’s where you set the foundation for your product's future growth and long-term success. Planning for future scaling is key to making that happen. Take WhatsApp, for example. 

In 2016, WhatsApp reached over a billion users, a feat achieved with only 50 engineers. They could do that because they planned for scalability from the start.

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