4 Crucial Steps to Mastering the MVP Development Process

Product teams in startups often have limited budgets and deadlines. With the limited resources available, they are tasked to develop new products, with no feedback, users, or feature requests. As an experienced professional designer experienced with these problems iTechnolabs understand how challenging this is.

There is a way to deal with uncertainty, remain focused on users, and deliver your product on time and within budget using an MVP development framework. Minimum viable products are untouched prototype that has the minimum of features needed to address the most pressing user issues. MVPs can help product teams understand more about their intended customers while taking less time in the process of design and development. They also lower the risk of design by allowing designers to try out their assumptions earlier.

In this blog, I’ll outline four steps that are essential to master how to master the MVP development process. To help us envision this method, we’ll create an app for food delivery similar to Zomato and Swiggy.

Steps to Mastering the MVP Development Process

Step 1: Define the MVP With a PRD

The first step of the MVP development process is to establish the product’s goals, functionalities, features, and behavior using the help of a document describing the product’s requirements. It is the PRD in the single point of reference, bringing all the project teams to the needs of the user. It should contain:

• The goal (problem assertion).
• Information about the idea (user personas stories of users, user personas, and epics).
• Analysis (assumptions of constraints, assumptions, and Success metrics).

Objective

• Problem Statement

A Problem statement describes the actual user issue that the product is designed to solve. It shouldn’t be more than one sentence and provide that the reader is aware of the goal of the product.

For instance: “We need to connect hungry customers to great restaurants that can deliver their orders ASAP.”

Ideation Information

• User Personas

User personas are individual user is an imaginary character who is the user’s type and performs a series of distinctive actions. Each persona is a part of solving the issue identified in the statement of the problem.

Utilizing personas used in MVP development design helps teams comprehend and connect with the end-users, and thus design their products to their requirements.

Analysis

• Assumptions

Assumptions are the things we believe to see from the product or what the user’s behavior will be. For instance, we assume the fact that Dante the Deliveryman works in restaurants during meal times. But his schedule and the restaurant hours may not match.

• Constraints

Constraints provide possible limitations to the product. For example, poor cell reception could mean that Chloe the customer won’t get notifications regarding what’s happening with her purchase.

If we can address the constraints and assumptions within the process of PRD we can address them earRemove term: mvp development process mvp developmenlier and deliver more enjoyable experiences to the end user.

• Success Metrics

Effective performance metrics like engagement, churn rate, and session duration are vital to measuring MVP performance. The development of these metrics allows us to verify our initial product idea and aid in the process of development.

In the app for food delivery, We can add:

• The number of downloads.
• The percentage of sign-ups.
• In the application, you can track time.

Step 2: Organize the MVP’s Information Architecture

The next stage of this MVP development process involves labeling and organizing all the digital content like sections, pages, and features. The result is known as Information Architecture (IA) and is divided into two components:

• Determining the content of the product as well as
• The process of determining the hierarchy of content

Define the App’s Content

To define a product’s content (pictures, music, text, videos, etc. ) We first study trends in the market, competition, and our customers. To link the dots among different content types, we build a “quick and dirty” mind map that includes topics, branches, and subtopics. Mind mapping helps us organize all of our content in one location and connect relevant subjects.

Mind map apps will include:

• A topic for restaurants that includes subtopics for menus as well as order logs and customer pages in the database.
• The menu subtopic comprises drinks and food choices, as well as special offers.

Determine the Content Hierarchy

The next step is to decide the best method to show your content i.e. how to structure it. One way to organize content is through the sorting of cards using users to organize topics into logical groups. This guarantees that the Information Architecture will be arranged following the expectations of the user instead of based on the assumptions of the product team.

To conduct a card sort:

• Pick topics that reflect the main content of the product.
• Group the topics with the user.
• Label each group according to the user’s name and then discuss the reasoning behind each choice.
• Repeat the three steps with the additional users.
• Review the results and search for common themes across the different groups and look for common patterns between the. This will help product designers better understand how their product’s user experience.

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