A minimum viable product or MVP is one of the basics of forming the product. That is not about building a basic version of your product, it is fundamental to deliver the primary functionality that makes a product resolve a particular issue or fulfil a certain purpose. It is the initial stage of creating a product that can be used to explain to future users their expectations and how others’ feedback can be used to improve the product in the following versions.

Product design refers to making products to enhance their ability to meet consumers’ needs and facilitate their eventual use.

It is noteworthy to find that for every Minimum Viable Product, there is always a thinking behind the Product design. It’s not a mere façade touch-up but a fundamental soft skill of realizing customer expectations alongside the emerging trends within the market and designing fundamental yet intelligent and efficient solutions. Good product design enables your MVP to primarily operate properly while at the same time providing customers with a pleasant experience.

Understanding Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

An MVP is centred on providing only essential features which solve a particular issue or meet a primary want among the consumers.

So why Start with an MVP?

One can use the basic model to immediately appeal to actual consumers for their input on the product. Such feedback is very useful and must be provided by the customers as it describes the areas where changes are required, as well as what has been done right or wrong. It reduces opportunities of investing so much in a product only for it to hit the market and no one wants to buy it.

The following are the major benefits of MVP development:

• Reduced Risk: When you launch a Minimum Viable Product, you save your money and the company’s reputation as fully developed products generate immense loss when failed in the market.
• Faster Time to Market: MVPs help you get your product in front of the users faster and give you a head start as well as help to quickly prove the value of your idea.
• Iterative Improvement: Being a fail-fast concept, MVPs create a clear path to update and improve your product over time, making sure it meets the user’s needs.

Merging of Product Design in the Creation of MVP

Product design is the crucial segment for Minimum Viable Product construction. This is not only a look, it is also the functionality of that particular product, and the extent to which it fits the user’s expectations. That is why it is critical that your MVP operates and is utilizable.

MVP is the initial significant component to developing products that are relevant and receptive to the audience and consequently, beneficial for the business.

Key Principles of Effective Product Design for MVPs

Designing and developing an MVP is more than just building a bare-bones version of your idea and releasing it to the wild. Thus, the decision on product design principles should be given a thoughtful approach to create an MVP that will not only work but also capture your target audience’s interest.

Designing for User-Centricity

Product Design: The act of creating Minimum Viable Product is centered on product design which is the look and feel as well as the functionality of the product you intend to bring to the market. Design thinking with a focus on the users is all about knowing your users, their needs, their habits, and their challenges. This way, you can guarantee that each aspect of your MVP and its interactions have a function that will add value to the platform for the target audience.

Simplicity and Usability

Operational Excellence – It has to be easy. MVPs should be designed to address primary goals that is, solving a given problem or fulfilling a crucial need. Operational excellence in design relates to making every aspect of the product functional with no excess in its design. It also improves usability, accelerates the application-building process and decreases its price at the same time.

Reiteration and System Transformation

Continuous Improvement – MVP development is a process that may be repetitive. It is about getting your product to the market and testing it to redefine the user’s requirements and constantly update it. Consequently, there is constant improvement which means that your MVP changes with the feedback it receives and the market conditions to become more relevant and competitive.

Superimposition of Lean and Six Sigma

Lean Six Sigma – Lean Six Sigma is an important method to manage the processes of new product development as it reduces all forms of wastage and enables efficient use of available resources. Due to this kind of approach, the resulting MVP will be more polished in terms of efficiency and quality, ensuring that it meets the customers’ needs, while at the same time, matching the overall objectives of the business.

Cost-Effective Design Decisions

Cost Reduction – Cost is a crucial element in Minimum Viable Product design. The selected design decisions should lead to the achievement of the best possible outcomes with the least amount of resource input. This entails the identification of capital priorities as defined by the extent of their effectiveness, the determination of cheaper materials and technologies and lastly, the finesse in the usage of capital about the production expenditure.

Indeed the concept of Total Cost of Ownership

Total Cost of Ownership – The cost when compared with rivals to understand the overall life-cycle cost of the finished product. This encompasses maintenance, support, and possibly, scale-up challenges. Thus, the consideration of the total cost of ownership contributes to the creation of a viable and profitable MVP.

Thus, efficient MVP design is not about the beauty of the product; it is about the actual functionality of the product, its usability, and practical decisions made concerning the product. When you combine product development, Lean Six Sigma, operations excellence, change management, continuous improvement, cost optimization and total cost of ownership, you can develop MVP that will sustain itself and equally capture the consumers’ choice.

Lean Six Sigma and MVP Development

Lean Six Sigma has special importance in the sphere of product development, it is one of the primary means of achieving optimization. In MVP context it is a rather effective strategy that can guarantee success.

Lean Six Sigma combines two methodologies:

• Lean deals with the elimination of waste and the improvement of the efficacy of various activities to provide desired value.
• Six Sigma’s main target is to minimize defects and variations in their work processes for improved quality.

Lean Six Sigma in Minimum Viable Product Development

Streamlining Processes: Lean principles are used in the development process because they assist in minimizing the wastage of time and/or resources by eradicating the majority of the superfluous steps.

Reducing Waste: The reduction of wastage in inputs enables the teams to hone the utility of functional operations that enhance end users’ requirements.

Quality Assurance: Six Sigma prevent the MVP from being released with inherent defects that might lower customer loyalty through tests to ensure that The MVP is perfect.

Operational Excellence in Minimum Viable Product Development

Proper implementation of an organization’s operations is essential in guaranteeing that an MVP that will be developed will satisfy the customer and meet the organization’s business objectives.

Why is Operational Excellence Significant in MVPs?

• Efficient Resource Allocation: Teams can commit resources to value-added activities that give MVP the best chances of success such as product design and development.
• Consistent Quality: Operational excellence makes it possible for the MVP to have every stage developed to strict quality measures that reduce complexity in production thus improving reliability.
• Adaptability: Depending on the market or customer feedback, MVPs may need to be more flexible, especially in further development. Where operational excellence exists there is the ability to respond and adapt or enhance services as and when feedback is received.

Measures for the Operational Management

Continuous Improvement: This culture of never settling for mediocrity can be used to make improvements to the MVP in subsequent weeks and so on to address some of the remarks made by the users in their attempt to make the application more user-friendly as well as satisfactory.

Risk Management: It is concerning to control risks when working on MVP, and this is the reason why the process of risk identification and management has to be done proactively to minimize possible disruptions during the project.

Team Collaboration: Project management of an MVP requires cross-functional teams through proper communication and cooperation in maintaining operational efficiency at every stage.

Advantages of operations management when creating MVP

Faster Time-to-Market: Simplified structures and the flow of work create more effective timetables, which helps companies bring out MVPs before rivals and capture relevant market niches.

Cost Efficiency: As a result of cutting down wastage and maximizing efficiency, operational excellence plays a role in Cost control while passing no negative impacts to the quality of goods or services for the clients.

Enhanced Customer Satisfaction: Being able to deliver an MVP that satisfies the target customer’s expectations ensures that they begin to trust the brand, ensuring that subsequent versions of the product have the customers’ trust.

Change Management in MVP Projects

Change management is an important component towards the achievement of the creation of MVP. That said, it is necessary to consider how effective change management can contribute to appropriate Minimum Viable Project project implementation.

Managing change aims at adopting systematic ways of planning and implementing different strategies that alter people, groups, and organizations from one state to another. MVP projects, it concerns with the smooth implementation of changes with little or no interference.

Change management is very important when it comes to MVPs

Adaptation to Feedback: It should also be pointed out that MVP development usually implies changes based on users’ feedback in cycles. These system frameworks make it easier for teams to enable feedback integration in such a way that does not affect the time or quality of the work being done.

Stakeholder Engagement: Organizations enjoy the support of the stakeholders mainly because they are involved right from the start of the change process hence enhancing the effective implementation of change.

Risk Mitigation: Risks that are related to changes, have to be recognized together with their possible consequences and possible actions that will prevent change disruption in MVP development.

Strategies of Change Management

Clear Communication: When change is communicated and perhaps the reasons for the change and the anticipated result are explained, change cascaded to the various teams makes the change more acceptable.

Phased Implementation: The gradual roll-out of changes also means that even huge changes are made in small increments that help check the effectiveness of such changes, the reception that they will receive from other employees, and other factors that might indicate that such changes should not be made fully and immediately.

Training and Support: Offering sufficient training and backing up to the teams guarantees that they can implement the new processes or characteristics included in the MVP.

If you want to learn different strategies on how to launch your MVP, head over to our Article here Strategic Planning for Profitability and Long-Term Success

Enhanced Adaptability: An effective change management strategy means that teams respond to change promptly, which suits their chances in the market, customers’ preferences and technological influences.

Improved Collaboration: Change management encourages stakeholders and the members of the change team to participate in the change process, which leads to success.

Accelerated Innovation: Change management for growth fosters the rate of innovation as it facilitates quick time-to-market and learning as a result of MVP models.

Continuous Improvement in MVP Iterations

The efficiency of ongoing improvement is a concept that involves a series of planned and systematic changes that are cumulative thus improving the overall performance. In the case of MVPs, it is the ongoing process in which modifications are made to the specific features of the product or service are made to fit the market environment.

Because MVPs are relatively very important in modern business, let us discuss their importance in relationship to continuous improvement:

Enhancing User Experience: With the help of iterating the MVP, the teams can also oversee the opportunities to solve users’ problems and increase the potential of the solutions and services that contribute to the growth of satisfaction through product usage.

Staying Competitive: This is due to the frustrating nature of fast-paced markets, whereby the competition is constantly changing by the latest technology trends and customer preferences, any lapse in improvement would render the MVP obsolete or irrelevant.

Iterative Learning: Every version of the Minimum Viable Product sheds light on the strengths and weaknesses of the product so that, the working teams can steer in the right direction based on the knowledge of what a target audience accepts or rejects.

Strategies for Continuous Improvement

• Feedback Loops: Designing feedback loops means that the information is collected at all stages of MVP development and from users and other stakeholders.
• Data-Driven Decisions: Analysis of the user’s data to define trends and patterns allows teams to focus on the actual changes that contribute to user satisfaction.
• Agile Methodologies: Scrum implementation, for example, makes teams flexible in the process with the ability to work on frequent and fast cycles to deliver value continually.

Want to dive deeper into the basics of continuous improvement, you can read it here  Continuous Improvement: Driving Success in Product Design and Operational Excellence

Product Design Strategies for Cost Reduction

The concept of reducing costs specifically applies to the cost of a product’s design to create an MVP that both has value and can generate profits.

Necessity of Decreasing Cost of Products during the Design Process:

• Financial Efficiency: When the design involves cost reduction we can manage available resources effectively so that the cost of the product does not increase in the future.
• Competitive Pricing: The reduced production costs mean that pricing strategies on the MVP can be more competitive and thus appeal to the relevant customers out there in the market.
• Profitability: By cutting down on costs of designs and manufacturing, organizations can improve the levels of profitability thus retaining the savings for future developments.

Strategies for Economic Product Design

• Simplified Design: Reducing complex components and making them basic during the manufacturing process while maintaining usability.
• Material Selection: A far more careful selection of materials that would be most efficient in terms of cost and at the same time will be able to perform well. In some cases, there are ways that with the help of some kind of material that costs less money, you can get very similar results.
• Design for Manufacturing (DFM): The implementation of DFM principles makes sure that the product produced can easily be assembled, and maintained at a lower cost.

Lean Manufacturing Principles

• Just-in-Time (JIT): New JIT refreshing principles eradicate stocked items inventory expenses whose production becomes relevant only when an order is placed.
• Kaizen: Any arrangements for processes in manufacturing involve a campaign for continuous improvement to enhance efficiency and/or minimize costs in the long run.

If you want to learn more about the importance of cost reduction and TCO in business, you can find an article about it here