The MVP+ (with sprinkles on top!)
During my 8 years in product management, I’ve taken roughly 10 products from idea to market. It is never an easy task. Most of my MVPs were not quite as fast as they were furious.
The processes of building an MVP and market validation are described with detail and with brilliance in many books, with “The Lean Startup” at the top of that list, but there is one part I felt they don’t touch on enough: the wow factor.
It’s counterintuitive, since “minimum” and “wow” don’t seem to fit together. So I’ll take the next 800 words or so to explain why I think that not only do they fit together — the wow element should be a must in your next MVP.
A few years ago, I was working on a quiz app. There are tons of them, and ours wasn’t particularly special. Trying to help it stand out, we replaced our ordinary progress bar with an animation of a person taking a step forward, every time you answered a question. If you skipped a question, the person would jump. If you went back to make sure you answered correctly, he would turn and run. This wasn’t time consuming or pricy — I believe the animation cost around $500 to do — but it became what everybody focused on. It didn’t matter if we couldn’t support this or that functionality, it was just fun to do.
There’s a long debate on what constitutes a good MVP, but I’ll add my 2-cents here: minimum viable is not minimum valuable. On the flip side of the value coin, there’s friction. For every pro, there’s a con. There are good reasons not to use your new product: you’re unproven, and you’re missing basic functionality the competition has had for ages. Viable means that the value outweighs the friction.
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The best way I know to tackle this issue is to make sure you include some insanely cool features. These features should be small enough to not distract you from your main mission. The worst thing you can do with an MVP is to bite off more than you can chew, which can lead to the endless spiral of the build trap. Your wow features should be small, awesome, and they should put a spotlight on what makes you special.
The TagBox example
A few months ago, I started working on a new knowledge management platform called TagBox. It has a really cool origin story which I’ll share in another post soon, but in a few words: we’ll take your messy company drive, organize it, and improve your working experience.
Our core premise is that folder-based drives are ill-suited for teamwork, and instead, we intend to be the first knowledge management platform to be completely tag-based. You can read our full Manifesto if you’re interested.
As expected, we’re taking a very lean approach to our MVP: by integrating with your existing file manager (e.g. Dropbox), we’ve saved a ton of work on storage, syncing, version control, and permissions. We’re super focused on our main value proposition — see and sort all of your files by topic, in a slick, netflix-like interface. This approach helped us get to a working prototype within a month and a half of development, end we expect to be in Beta in just 2 months.
While I truly believe this alone should give companies tremendous value, we’re taking a step forward to what you might call an MVP+.
For us, that included three things:
- Saving links:
During our market research, we were amazed to find out that none of the other apps let you save links. Content is content, whether it’s saved in a Word document or on a website. Other apps were forcing users to split how they manage content — saving documents to the drive, while saving links as local, unsharable bookmarks. Since bookmarks are very simple creatures — basically a single line of text — it was a very quick win for us. - Subscribe to channels:
Current knowledge managers work with a pull, rather than push, approach. You can search for content, but if you don’t know it exists, you wouldn’t know to look for it. The use of tags gave us the rare opportunity to allow users to subscribe to a tag (or a group of tags), to get email notifications. You might be a marketer that wants to know when someone is working on competitive analysis, or a sales rep that needs to be informed of a new protocol. Again — easy win with massive wow-factor. - Advanced tag suggestions:
In other tag-based apps, we noticed that the main issue is the existence of very similar tags — singual/plural, caps/lower case, or simply synonyms of the same word. Using natural language processing, we managed to prevent about 90% of those cases. While it did take us a little while to find the right nlp model for our needs, the actual implementation of these nlp models is actually quite simple.
There’s no doubt you should try to launch as quickly as possible, and having spent my share of time on bloated MVPs that took a year to lunch, I’m the first person in the room to vote for focus.
But to me, the MVP approach is often taken to an extreme. “Minimal” should not apply “boring”. To me, you should always find those few small killer-features, to make the entire product stand out.
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