You own the product; your customers own the problem
When building an MVP, focus on what problem you want to solve and what benefits you want to deliver to your end-user, not what features to build.
I cannot stress this enough because it leads to wasted time and effort.
In early customer conversations, DO NOT ASK CUSTOMERS FOR FEATURES.
Instead, ask questions that give you a better understanding of the problem you want to solve with your MVP and the benefits you want to deliver to your end-user.
Today, I read pages 15–16 of the Mom Test. Here is what I took from those pages:
1. No, you're not deviating from your creative vision if you're talking customers.2. You own the problem. So always be asking yourself this question: "does my MVP actually solve the problem?"
Small, iterative steps, not grand visions
That grand creative vision of how your end-product will look?
It’s idealistic and distracting.
When developing a product, because of our exposure to great products that have so many awesome features, we think that our product has to do everything
Now.
That couldn’t be further from the truth.
Product development is an iterative process.
Your product will go through iterations. As you start getting user feedback, you’ll start modifying your product in response to that feedback and hopefully create a better product for your users.
Repeat this process of feedback →improvement →feedback enough times and you may end up with a great product, but only if you continually enter into these iterative cycles.
Small, iterative steps and closely paying attention to user feedback is what will get you to a great product, not some grand vision of a product that will take months to build, probably plague you with feature creep and cause you to spend a ridiculous amount of time and money, only for you to then find that your users aren’t using what you’ve built.
So take small steps, never stop talking to users, and continually iterate on your product.
Does my MVP actually solve the problem?
After months of development and thousands of dollars spent, you find yourself with a visually stunning software product that’s full to the brim with awesome features.
Eager to test out the product, you show it to users.
They don’t use it.
Where did you go wrong?
You probably didn’t build the product that solves the problem that you said you were going to solve.
Probably because you did not do proper customer questioning, leading to an incomplete or even non-existent understanding of the problem that your customers are facing and what benefits they’re after in a product.
Do not focus on MVP aesthetics.
You see, your MVP is not art.
Just because it looks pretty and has ten different features does not mean it will attract users.
Users are attracted to solutions to their problems, especially if these solutions promise benefits that directly address users’ pain-points.
I started Knowledge Grind Notes with the goal of reading 1–10 pages of a book every single day and then writing an article to recall what I learnt and my thoughts on what I learnt. I wrote this article to summarize what I learnt from pages 15–16 of the Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick, which is a book about how to interview your users and draw insights from them to help develop your business and product.
