However, how can you be sure that you are building a product that people actually want? Imagine pouring your heart and soul into a product and releasing it into the world only to hear crickets?
We create minimum viable products (MVPs) to help our clients grow an audience, learn what the users want, adapt to changing market demands, and gather insights to guide future development and design.
An MVP must have the right features for its purpose in order to work. Let’s look at how to decide what features your MVP must have.
Identify Your Objectives
You should define what you want this MVP to do for you before you get too excited about all the cool things it can do. Here are some examples:
- Create a unique offering: To gain a competitive edge, offer features that are not available in the market.
- Launch an in-demand product: 35% of startups fail because there isn’t enough market demand for their products. Develop features that can help validate that your solution is indeed valuable and relevant.
- Achieve your long-term goals: If your digital product is part of an overarching business plan, you should prioritize features that’ll fit into the big picture and support your business model.
- Be the first to market: If you want to gain a first-mover advantage, you need to prioritize features that can help you establish a foothold in the market and gain traction as quickly as possible.
In addition, you should focus your MVP’s features on validating high-risk assumptions, proving product-market fit and gathering actionable user feedback.
Know Your Target Audience
You need to make sure that your MVP’s features are relevant and valuable to your target market in order to drive adoption and gain traction. For this reason, you must understand the needs of your audience.
- Create buyer personas to understand the ideal customer demographics (e.g., age, gender, location, job title,) interests, preferences, and challenges.
- Identify the specific problem that your product solves for your users and focus the MVP’s features on their biggest pain point.
- Do a reality check — Can you articulate succinctly how your MVP’s features can solve your audience’s challenges? Write a one-liner and see if it resonates with your market.
- Find out how your audience solves their problem now. Knowing what’s working and what isn’t will help you identify features that can differentiate your product from the competition.
There are many ways to identify your target audience. You can do a survey to find out what their challenges are if you want quantitative insight. You can also analyse social media posts to figure out what your ideal customers are talking about (e.g., customer service reps) or ask your customer-facing team.
Conduct a competitive analysis
Stand out from your competitors and carve out a niche in the market with the features of your MVP. Knowing your competition is crucial for success.
- Find out which of your direct competitors offer a similar solution to your target audience. Analyse their strengths and weaknesses before choosing your own product. features that’ll do a better job in solving your users’ biggest pain point.
- Identify indirect competitors that offer different products but meet the needs of your target market in other ways. Aside from tangible results, it is also important to take into account how these products satisfy the psychological needs of their users.
- Think about people who choose not to do anything. How do they not take action to solve their problems? They may not be aware that there is a solution, or your competitors’ products might be too complicated for them. You should tailor the MVP’s features to address the barrier to adoption.
When conducting a competitive analysis, look for gaps in the market. As a result, you can define features that can address the frustrations of your target audience.
Decide what is a “must-have” and what is a “nice to have”
Every great idea is tempting to incorporate into your MVP. You are more likely to lose focus if you do so. Cut the fat if necessary. The MVP should only contain the following “must-have” features:
- Test your product idea.
- Demonstrate fit between product and market.
- Embrace your brand’s values.
- Establish an initial user base.
- Ensure the launch of the product is as risk-free as possible.
The nice-to-have features are not out of the question. The focus is on prioritisation for the moment. Don’t worry about them now; you can add them as future enhancements once you have a solid user base.
Nail Your Killer Features and Define Your Unique Value Proposition
The features of your MVP should help you formulate a unique value proposition that is relevant to your target market and sets you apart from the competition.
You already have all the pieces of the puzzle you need to craft a unique value proposition if you follow the steps above. As a bonus, you can also use the process to verify that the features of your MVP are relevant and valuable to your target market.
We need to put all the pieces together: Describe what your MVP’s features can do to solve your customers’ biggest pain points. These features should be directly related to your users’ problems. Next, explain how your MVP is different from the existing solutions on the market and how it can benefit your target audience.
Consider whether your audience will be moved to action by your unique value proposition. Would users migrate to your app if your features were so much better?
Feature-rich MVP launch
MVPs should be a key component of your overall product development process. In addition to supporting your product strategy, it should lay the foundation for your audience and revenue model.
Don’t forget that your MVP is a stepping stone to bigger things. As such, it is crucial to gather user feedback, analyze usage data, and make continuous improvements. You can stay agile to ensure that your product is being iterated to meet your long-term business goals.
Ready to get started with your MVP? Get in touch to see how we can help you set the right course and nail the best features to include in your MVP.
