There is so much banter about MVP vs MDP in the tech world. MVP stands for “Minimal Viable Product”. What does that mean ? For starters an MVP is the most pared down version of a product that can still be released. An MVP has three key characteristics:
- Has enough value that people are willing to use it or buy it initially
- Demonstrates enough future benefit to retain early adopter
- Provides a feedback loop to guide future development
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The core idea behind an MVP is validated learning. As an entrepreneur you want to be constantly checking your assumptions and making adjustments wherever needed. MVP is an exercise in temporarily shaking off that obstinate entrepreneurial vision of yours. Businesses get only one chance to make an impression. Here is where UX “User Experience” comes into play.
A MDP “minimum delightful product” is a version of your product consisting of just enough to engage and delight your users. It helps you to do slightly more than just validate features: it means you can start to engage your customers and build interest.
As a rule of thumb, where MVPs are optimized for speed, MDPs are optimized to maximize user experience.
Why the recent shift?
An MVP that misses ‘desirable’ will risk the unintended consequence of poor user adoption. Instead, MVP’s should focus on what constitutes priority, need, and desire from an understanding of user context, behavior, and scenario. The focus should shift to the MDP (Minimum Desirable Product).
A Lean UX approach can help define what users think they need vs actually need in a feature (leaning on the actually need portion). MVP’s is based on internal priority. Excluding users from MVP decisions leaves products and services in danger of poor user adoption.
Instead of what’s minimally viable, we should be talking about what’s minimally desirable for users.
To illustrate lest take an example of a car purchase. Based on the MVP decisions, a typical car manufacturer would concentrate on noise-cancellation, seating comfort , sunroof designs as they believe that most of the people would make calls while driving. However is a case study it was found that more than two-thirds of the buyers cared about the emotional value such as things that could be enhanced in the car specs such as cup-holders for their children. Hence defining the user priorities is critical for bringing an MDP approach to your MVP feature. MVP decisions should be informed with a good UX process. A good UX process includes research , so MVP needs to be developed after the User research, not before!
Conclusion: The MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is a double-edged sword that focuses your engineering and product management priorities, but also may steamroll user priorities. It’s also worth noting that MVP and MDP are not mutually exclusive and can be used in a complementary way. One can start by launching an MVP to validate the product concept and gather data and then use that data to inform the development of an MDP that includes additional features and functionality. This approach can help to ensure that the final product is both viable and desirable in the market.