Idea Validation & MVP

Why should we care about validating ideas?

One of the greatest product management sins is wasting your organisation’s time and money developing a product or feature that fails. As a product manager it’s your job to ensure that if you green light a product it has a good shot at success, which means it’s critical to ensure that you’re not frivolously hedging bets on something that’s doomed from the start.

When you take the time to validate, you’re reducing the odds of building a product (or adding a functionality) that fails by answering important questions such as:

• Are you solving the right problem?
• Are you solving the right problem at the right time?
• Is your solution the right solution?

The trick is knowing how to find the answers.

How can you validate your solution?

1. The first step in idea validation process is to identify the right problem to solve. The question should not be “Can this product be built?” but “Should this product be built?” and “Can we build a sustainable business around this set of products and services?”
2. If you’d like to stick with Lean Startup principles, an MVP would be a great place to find and know your early target audience. A simple landing page with a sign-up form is a highly-effective MVP when you’re looking to gauge interest in your solution and get in touch with interested parties.
3. So build a landing page; do keyword research on the problem you’re solving to see how people are looking for solutions (and how often they do) and put together something that looks nice and captures the email addresses or other information you need from potential customers.
4. Once you’ve amassed a collection “sign-ups” you’ll be able to start getting in touch and having conversations with folks that will help guide you in the right direction. If you don’t get any sign-ups or any interest, it may be a good idea to reassess your idea and how you marketed it.

What is an MVP?

A minimum viable product, or MVP, is a product with enough features to attract early-adopter customers and validate a product idea early in the product development cycle.

It is the version of a new product that allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least amount of effort.

How MVP works. It is useful in every stage.

If you’re wondering what this would look like in practice, let’s review how a couple of familiar brands launched successful MVPs.

Airbnb

With no money to build a business, the founders of Airbnb used their own apartment to validate their idea to create a market offering short-term, peer-to-peer rental housing online. They created a minimalist website, published photos and other details about their property, and found several paying guests almost immediately.

Swiggy

Swiggy was launched in 2014 using the MVP framework. They built an app using very little resources to fulfill the need of their customers.

The app only offered a way to place food orders from a restaurant. It did not have:

• Coupons
• Extensive payment options
• No delivery tracking options
• No AI-based chatbots

Most of their operations were done the manual way.

Do you want to become a Product Manager?

For starters, you can follow me, go through the other stuff I have written, and learn as much as you can from here.

If that isn’t enough or doesn’t help and if you want a more personalised learning experience, consider joining our Product Management cohort at Crework — Apply now