Design Strategy for MVP (Part 0)
Part 0: Mindsets when building MVP as a product designers
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Q: What mindset should I adopt when my team is developing the minimum viable product?
You probably have heard about minimum viable product (MVP).
It’s a powerful way to validate your idea. But feels counterintuitive.
When building MVP, product designers need to operate differently. Many designers are frustrated that it feels counterintuitive to build MVP. In this series, we’ll see how designers can add value when the team needs to build the MVP:
Part 0: Set the right mindset when building MVP (This post)
Part 3: How to recognize your critical assumptions
Common doubts product designers have about MVP
The first time I encountered the concept of MVP, I had a lot of questions:
Why do we need to launch the ugly thing or a ‘garbage product?
Why don’t we talk to users first and maybe survey them first?
Why do we need to launch quickly?
How can people love our product if it’s incomplete?
After years of building products, I learned that MVP is powerful but hard to understand. Many people also have the wrong idea about MVP, which makes it even harder to execute properly. I’d love to share my learnings and research.
What’s the point of MVP if we build an ‘ugly’ product?
The first time I tried to understand the MVP method, I fell to the common misconception. I thought MVP meant launching a barebones, minimum, and ugly product. But the ‘minimum’ thing to build is very fluid.
This means that sometimes the minimum has to be beautiful. For example, if you're building a budgeting app, you need a trustworthy and easy-to-use design. It depends on your target audience. Sometimes, you need an aesthetic and elegant experience. Sometimes you don’t.
Takeaway: the core concept of MVP is never to tell you to build an ugly thing. As Eric Ries pointed out, people misunderstood that “MVP is like bare-bones, stripped down the thing that will crash your computer. It has nothing to do with MVP.”1
Why do we need to launch quickly?
Designers will wonder: why do we need to launch quickly? Can't we survey the users or talk to them? It depends on what you want to learn.
When you talk to strangers, you can learn about their problems and how they operate now. On the other hand, you’ll learn about different things when you launch and talk to people who use your product. You can learn whether your product is helping users.