Your Vision. Comes to Life.
We’ll take you from prototype to fully functioning product.
Explore our 9-step process for creating an MVP in 3 project phases: Organize, Finalize & Optimize
This phase takes you through this journey of transformation:
The steps:
Using the prototype, we decide those elements that make the cut, or add elements that may not have required a prototype. Not all elements of the prototype are necessarily part of the initial MVP. Likewise, there may have been elements that were equivalent in operational characteristics that didn’t require a prototype. We determine scope at this stage.
What parts of the MVP get used by users and to what extent? How long does it take to complete certain activities? What activities do users start but never finish? These and questions like these are critical to track and get answer to. This is why you have an MVP! Answers to these questions give you quantitative direction for future product decisions, and improve the all so important ability to achieve customer retention and reduces your investment risk.
With the full scope in hand, including metrics, the technical design can commence. With a view towards likely architecture of the production product, this step includes figuring out what frameworks, computer languages, development strategies and techniques will be utilized to build out the product.
This phase takes you through this journey of transformation:
The steps:
Testing requires more than a cursory spin through the application. Testing needs to consider the different inputs, outputs and ways a user passes through the application. A systematic approach ensures that quality issues are caught and resolved before a user is inconvenienced.
In this step, we want to develop tests on infrastructure with a view towards a production application. Our MVP can also serve as a Minimum Viable Architecture (MVA), that allows us to test our architectural choices. Consider other applications we may connect to, backend databases, the use of cloud or on-premises computing, database technologies and implementations, networking considerations and any other infrastructure and deployment strategies.
Generally, it makes the most sense to prioritize the most difficult or risky things. We may decide to develop those things that are difficult to test first? Maybe we build those things that are most important to the users first? Whatever the criteria, development is prioritized and executed according to those priorities.
This phase takes you through this journey of transformation:
The steps:
Now development starts. Steps 8 and 9 occur in parallel as development completes and enough is completed in order to use it.
That which was developed is taken through its paces according to the test plan from step 4. We simulate the work that customers will complete on the application, trying to find inconsistencies with what was designed, either with incorrect output for a given input, the look and feel, the user experience goals, the workflow or any other functional or non-functional aspects of operation. We consider if the program is an improvement to the jobs-to-be-done too.
Here, we prioritize and address any of the issues we find in step 8 and then loop from step 7 through step 9 as needed.
The whole point of creating an MVP is to test the research completed in The Product Concept Series and The Product Experience Series products we offer. Software Prophets provides decades of experience in building applications that users want to use. Completing the steps in this product development offering, you are well-equipped to not only start delivering a product to customers, but also in a position to gauge your progress and possibly make adjustments as you prepare to scale your product and grow your customer base.
Do you want to learn about the next product series in our Your Vision Builder Playbook? After completing this process, the next logical step would be The Product Scale Series where we build out a product that is ready to scale to tons of users.
If you would like some help or just have some questions about this, let’s schedule a time to talk by clicking this button and selecting a convenient time.