Excited about having an excellent product idea? But stammer in thinking about the risks involved in it? That’s where the Minimum Viable Product or MVP was born and busted!

Let’s make it clear What is MVP and Why do you need MVP?

In simple terms, MVP is the miniature version of the product with salient and essential features and enters into the market to gather insights and feedback. Instead of building a product with a huge investment, spending ample time and resources, and then launching it into the market. MVP can be developed in minimal time with adequate resources and enter into the market. So in this article, we are going to unlock why MVP is important and how to build MVP.

How to build an MVP?

A SaaS MVP development firm keenly focuses on a strategic approach to develop the essential features of the product. MVP developers first focus on identifying the primary need or problem that the outcome product can solve. Then highlight the significant features accordingly with an expert product development team. After that, the expert SaaS MVP developers create a prototype to visualize the basic structure of the product. If it seems appealing and satisfying, the development phase will start focusing on minimum essential features that resolve the basic problem while entering into the market. Gradually on a sprint basis, adding more features based on market research such as insights, reviews, and feedback from real-time users. Ultimately this process ensures that the product meets the user’s needs and cuts down the high expenses, time, and resources. As a leading agile product management consultant, we will break down the steps involved in developing MVP and what are all the processes in it.

Step 1: Define Your Idea

Articulate your product idea by describing what the product is and its goals like it is a web app, mobile app, or a service, and frame the objectives. Explain the uniqueness of the product and its salient features to everyone in an easy way to grasp.
Without understanding the problems in the market you cannot provide an exact solution. Identify the customer needs and their problems by researching the common issues encountered by a large group of users and validate that the problem is real.
Identify your target audience and their needs based on demographics such as location, age, gender, occupation, etc., Understand their specific preferences and make sure that your product fits into their daily lives.

Step 2: Market Research

Analyze the market based on your industry and your competitors, such, as understanding the market size, its growth rate, who are all the direct and indirect competitors, their products, strengths, weaknesses, price, and their market position.
Understanding your competitors alone cannot bring success rate, find the market gaps and what are all the current trends revolving among customers and in the overall industry.
To achieve this, conduct direct surveys and one-on-one interviews to gather quantitative data regarding their preferences, and interest in your product. Keen on open-ended questions to understand users’ pain points and make it easy to address them.

Step 3: Set Clear Goals

Elucidate the primary goals for your SaaS MVP Development. It helps to stay focused on the product vision in the further development process. Make sure to validate that the goals of the product that you defined to address the user’s challenges and test it fits into the market. Gather the feedback from initial users and welcome the negative feedback for further improvement.
Identify the KPIs to measure the success metrics of the MVP. It provides data-driven decisions on user engagement such as the number of active users, session duration, and user retention rates.
Set realistic and measurable objectives helps to be specific, time-bound, and aligned with our primary objectives.

Step 4: Prioritize Core Features

Pinpoint the core functionality of the MVP based on user needs. As you understand the user needs, prioritize the needs based on their value and feasibility.
Also, keep in mind that building the MVP is simple speed up the development process and plan for future iterations for additional features based on user needs.

Step 5: Create User Personas

Developing detailed user personas based on demographics, psychographic, and behavioral data from users helps to understand their preferences and behaviors. As you gather insights from the personas, you can build MVP tailored to users’ needs.

Step 6: Design User Flows

Create user flows by defining goals, sequence steps, how the users navigate the MVP product, and end-to-end road map of the user journey from login to exit of the product.
Design user-friendly UX that is very clear, easy to access and understand the workflow, and consistent design elements.
Analyse the feedback loop based on user input which helps to sort out any unclear or confusion in user accessibility.

Step 7: Develop a Prototype

Create interactive mockups with core functions using prototyping tools that simulate the user experience. Conduct rigorous testing and Gather insights on how users effectively access with clarity and functionality.
Ready to make adjustments based on insights and iterate the testing process.

Step 8: Choose the Right Technology Stack

Keen on opting for the right technology stacks that support MVP development. As the user base is expanding consider the scalability that adapts for the user’s expansion to handle increased volume of traffic.
Access the tools that you are familiar with for transparent team coordination and communication.

Step 9: Development

Focus on the development phase of MVP with basic features based on research and insights and make sure that satisfy the user needs. Implement Agile methodologies for the iterative approach which helps to work on a sprint basis by breaking down the bulk tasks into small chunks for continuous improvement.

Step 10: Test and Iterate

Testing plays an equal role in the development to provide quality products. Conduct rigorous usability testing throughout the development to point out the issues with user accessibility. Keen on what the user suggests regarding the product and make necessary improvements on an iterative approach.

Step 11: Launch Your MVP

Focus on launching with a sufficient audience to monitor their usage and identify issues accordingly. Based on user responses and volume, scale up your MVP accordingly.

Step 12: Analyze Metrics and Gather Insights

Don’t rest after the successful launch of MVP. The crucial part is here to take. Track the KPIs and user engagement metrics to figure out the issues and pinpoint the areas of improvement. Use advanced data analytics to analyze user behavioral patterns and gather insights. Access the user’s performance data to make necessary informed decisions for future development.

Conclusion

It’s time to conclude with that always keep in mind while developing MVP. It’s about learning and iterating based on user needs, preferences, challenges, and changes in the market. Stay connected with users for further improvement, be flexible, adapt to user volume and their feedback, and tirelessly put efforts into improving your product according to the market.

As MVP is a mini version of the actual product, the best agile product management consultant knows how to build MVP in constrained time and budget. They focus on a standardized approach, understanding user needs, market trends, market fluctuations, and future development which weigh off your burdens on thinking about successful product completion.

Akratech a leading Saas MVP development company, takes care of your product idea into life with minimal time and budget with intuitive user experience and reliability. Akratech has served in the industry for one and half decades with great proven track records of successful products. Whatever the industry our expertise will assist you from requirements gathering to market launch and consecutive support.

Have a product idea in mind? Connect with our MVP experts.