If you are a software engineer who jumps from an outsource company to a startup, there are a lot of concepts that you have to know when building a product, and one of them is the Minimum Viable Product or what is used to be called MVP a simple way to gather user behavior with minimum resource.
So what is a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)?
An MVP is a product with enough features to attract early-adopter customers and validate a product idea early in the product development cycle. An MVP can help the product team receive user feedback as quickly as possible to iterate and improve the product.
The Purpose of an MVP
The main purpose of a minimum viable product is gathering information from the market about your idea before building the complete product.
That information helps you a lot at:
Validating the product idea with real-life data.
Reducing time-to-market for new feature releases.
Delivering value to your early adopters quickly.
Testing your product before building a complete features version.
Collecting data on user behavior.
Eliminating waste features or functionality.
Examples of Successful MVPs
Facebook: was once a website with the purpose of connecting students at Harvard University. Thefacebook (Facebook's MVP!), as it was then called, was a simple platform that connected students from the same classes by allowing them to post messages to shared boards.
Uber: was once called UberCab launched in 2009, it only worked on iPhones or via SMS to prove that the idea of a cheap ride-sharing service had a market.
Steps to Create an MVP
As a software engineer, when I think about an idea that can have the potential to build a product, there are some steps I will follow before getting hands-on building the product:
Visualize the idea that I want to build: it can be a website providing some service or an app that benefits personal life.
Define the main value of the product: What can the product benefit the user? What are the features that help users improve their lives or solve their problems?
Research the market and define your value: Is there any other company or individual that has already built the same product?
Build your product: based on the main features that you have defined.
Release the product: gather user information about the idea.
Final Thoughts on MVPs
If there is already someone in the market building the product with the same idea as you, that doesn't mean your product will fail. You can base your work on theirs to define another way to improve the idea and build another solution for that.
A successful product takes time to build, so start slow and keep going, keep trying until you succeed.