Crowdform - Define a Minimum Lovable Product

A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a product prototype allowing a startup to quickly validate market assumptions. See it as the barebone version of your digital product. Cutting the fat to move faster decreases the time-to-market, thus getting you closer to Product/Market fit. How do we define the set of features we need?  

You have to figure out what people want, without losing sight of your company’s mission: goal-oriented product requirements. Clear complete requirements are an absolute necessity to a project’s success, changes are expensive. Four steps to come up with the right MVP:

1. Elicitation

Eliciting is identifying the stakeholders’ needs. Stakeholders usually don’t know what they want, your job is to bring their latent needs into clear consciousness. 

Always stay close to them and use proven elicitation techniques, such as focus groups, customer discovery interviews, brainstorming sessions, or Osborn checklists. 

How to find relevant stakeholders? Use the already identified sources to find new ones (directly ask people, read documents, or analyze existing systems) and record them on a list. Then, filter your items by cost and repeat the process.

Goal-based reasoning has to drive elicitation, each item (What?) is linked to a business objective (Why?). Frameworks such as i* or BMM are used to this end. 

2. Documentation

Any information relevant to the project has to be documented to ensure its persistence, build a common reference and promote communication and objectivity. 

Natural language is preferred to ensure the accessibility of the requirements to every stakeholder.

Quality requirements follow the SMAR methodology: Simple (complete, unambiguous, understandable, atomic), Measurable (traceable, verifiable), Achievable, and Realistic (necessary, consistent).

3. Negotiation

Sometimes conflicts of interests arise between stakeholders and a common ground has to be found. It’s the founders’ responsibility to resolve requirement conflicts by taking clear unambiguous decisions. 

4. Validation

Once requirements are validated they can be translated to support the MVP design and development phases. Stakeholder requirements are divided into the functionals ones and the non-functionals ones, then modeled into semi-formal languages such as UML for developers or user stories in Agile management.

Defining requirements is not a linear process, it’s an iterative cycle. Requirements are bound to change fast, which is why you always have to ruthlessly prioritize. Ranking, one-criterion classification, Kano classification and the MoScoW Technique are proven tools for that.

More than just a minimum set of requirements, your MVP has to be lovable by your end-users, which is why it’s common to talk about developing a Minimum Lovable Product (MLP) instead: it’s better to have a smaller amount of users in love with your product than many unenthusiastic users. Focus on your fans.