How to Avoid New Product Failure With an MVP?

Every new product comes with lots of expectations from customers and suppliers. It is a risky venture and takes enormous efforts and resources to present the perfect product on launch day. Hence, industry experts strongly advocate implementing an MVP development process for businesses to reduce the risk of failure and enhance their chances of success while launching every new product in the market. Let's look deeper into this concept in this article.

What is an MVP, and what is its role in product development?

An MVP is a Minimum Viable Product launched with the product's core features to fulfill its basic functionality. This 'minimal feature set' is found in the market as a primary practice to generate product validation by actual users. This is followed by a/b testing, surveys, analytics, and user interviews to understand if it can gather users' attention and what corrections it needs further.

Employing an MVP enables the product development team to assess the product's practicality without leveraging additional time and resources. If someone asks why MVP is necessary to demonstrate the viability of a product, here are some crucial reasons:

• MVP helps in the decision-making process for further product improvement.
• It minimizes the development cost, and implementing minimal features is less time-consuming.
• It provides enough time to cope with the downsides of the process at the initial stage of development only.
• Testing the hypothesis is another advantage for fast delivery of the tested product.

Goals for New Product Development

Competing notions like 'first impression is last impression,' 'move fast and break things,' 'if you have not failed with your first product, you are running too late,' etc. are unnecessary. 

The entire focus should be on developing an agile product that has just enough features to meet the needs of the early customers and provides them with something that can acquire their feedback on shaping the future of the product.

An MVP provides developers with an opportunity to learn, helps find the perfect product development strategy, and assists in determining features to be included or added to the product with a product vision in mind. This ultimately becomes a motive to generate successful acceptance of the product by the users.

How can MVP Save a New Product from Failure?

'No market need' is the biggest reason behind the failure of a product. Just create a market need and present the solution. Sketching out an idea, getting feedback from your client, and then using that information to make the rest of the design for a landing page, an image, or a logo is much better than wasting 15 to 20 hours on a design only to find that your client hates it.

Concentrate on three critical factors in the right way to safeguard your new product from failure.

Minimum

Minimum reflects fundamentals or basics. It simply reminded us to keep the first version of your product manageable. For example, releasing a new payment app in any genre would need a friendly interface, a load-free system, secure payment gateways, and easy operation. Later, you can work on attractive designs, rewards, awards, contact records, etc.

Viable

Google defines 'viable' as practicable, feasible, or workable. A project should be viable and able to generate client feedback. It would hardly yield the insights needed to improve the product if it failed to meet their expectations. For example, if you have released a challenging video game that hardly makes the users clear even at the first level, you would need more feedback to improve the game.

Product

A product should always be something that customers should buy and use. As a standalone product, it should have all the possibilities of having a similar effect in the market that best satisfies clients' needs. For example, your mobile app design is acceptable with minor glitches and bugs, but you will lose customers if any of its versions crashes or irritates them.

How to Launch Better MVPs?

Before discussing how to launch better MVPs, it is imperative to discuss why MVP approaches should be taken. Finding a product-market fit, abandoning the product at an early stage if necessary, and saving time and money while starting with an MVP are significant factors in a product's success in the market.

The three important things to consider before launching an MVP are:

1. Shift towards MLP: Make a product that your customers love. It should be a Most Lovable Product to become the Most Valuable Product for your customers.
2. Initiate a Soft Launch by Going Live: Introduce your product softly. Save the task of 'banging drums and making things viral' for later, when you release the complete version of your product.
3. Test Ideas First: Perform the 'smoke test' and validate your ideas before building an MVP.

Insights

Let's take some practical examples:

Businesses Succeeded After Starting as an MVP: Facebook, Dropbox, Amazon

1. A small social network of college friends launched as 'Thefacebook' made users search for their friends and chat with them. Now, it has groups, ads, watch, marketplace, and live streaming as popular features. 
2. Drew Houston, the co-founder of Dropbox, already explained the concept behind the usage and significance of Dropbox to the users by releasing a video a day before the launch, and in a single night only, the app got pre-booked by over 75,000 early adopters.
3. Amazon beautifully utilized the concept of selling books online without needing to have any winning features. Today, it has become the world's largest book retailer, excluding China.

Businesses Epically Failed Because of Not Using MVPs: Snapchat Spectacles, New Coke, Google+

1. Only 0.08% of the users bought Snapchat Spectacles, and 50% kept them aside within a month. Composed and clear - no one needs a camera on their face if it allows them to use only the Snapchat app.
2. Coca-Cola's new version, 'New Coke,' tried copying the formula of Pepsi to snatch their fanbase but failed terribly, and their CEO had to apologize publicly.
3. Users found Google+ to be a bland version of Facebook. It won't ever be needed and, thus, was flushed off by the users.

Conclusion

Many product teams use MVP approaches in their organizations. If approached right, it excites customers about future product versions, stops product failures, and enhances conversions and sales. Making it lovable is a developer's responsibility, and it pays.