Minimum viable products and design
Over the last few months, I've been reading a lot about lean startups (while doing research for RNTRS) more specifically about MVP, or minimum viable product. MVP as a concept is simple enough; distill your release down to the least amount of features and functionality required to get to a working product. Sometimes people will create marketing pages with visionary screen mock ups actively promoting a hypothesized MVP to gauge consumer interest before anything is actually built. Once a case is made for a particular feature set, it is rapidly built, released, tested, and refined. Achieving MVP without sacrificing the value of the product is difficult. Arguably more difficult than simply building features willy nilly and seeing what sticks.
MVP is not about creating an anemic product, it is about getting to market quickly to test and iterate eventually leading to building stronger, more desirable products. Sure, it is possible to under deliver features or spend time building the wrong features, but through user testing this should be uncovered fairly early on in the process. As a designer, I look at this as a mirror the type of "discover, conceptualize, design, test, iterate" process that I have been executing on for years.Continue reading
