Design Strategy for MVP (Part 1)
Part 1: How to define your core use case
This series is for you if…
You’re a product designer or PM who wants to validate ideas with MVP
You want to think strategically and methodically when designing MVP
You want to find the sweet spot. Avoid cutting the scope and launching something ‘below the minimum,’ and people don’t get any value. Or spend too much time building the wrong thing.
By the end of this series, you’ll be able to…
Produce a core UX your team needs to build to test the idea.
Identify your team’s critical assumptions that you need to validate next.
Set the design strategy to build MVP collaboratively and gain insights.
Hello, I’m Budi. This is a 🔒 member-only post for my newsletter. Paid readers can access the full post and the template. This series is super practical, and you can follow along. Thanks for supporting me as an indie creator.
Part 1: How to define core use case (this post)
Part 3: How to recognize your critical assumptions
Use Case
Every product has one core use case
Dropbox? Their core value is the file-syncing mechanism
Airbnb? You use it to book a place in a local area when traveling
Slack? You can communicate with team members easily
A use case is why people want to use your product over the other solutions. The bottom line: Every product has one core use case. Something that people care about. Something that makes people use the product. Product designers should define the use case collaboratively to build a design strategy for MVP.
CEO said, “Let’s build a budgeting app.”
Let’s imagine we work in a startup.
The CEO said, “Let’s build a better budgeting app.”
Your first thinking should be: “What’s the use case?”
Why would people want another budgeting app? How is this better?
When your team builds a new product, you start with this abstract idea. Let’s build this or that. We can clarify the use case to make this abstract idea more concrete. Let’s dive in!
Let’s build the use case
When I say use case, there are four parts: problem, who, alternative, and value. The template is at the end of the post. I recommend you try to apply it to your work. Open it in another window and follow along.
Step 1: Problem
The first part is the problem.
We want to think of the pain points that people might have. Specifically, think about macro-level problems that you want to solve. Here are the common problem areas that most products try to address.
Cost — the current solution is expensive. A good example is Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drug. They want to solve the expensive drugs in the United States.