Congratulations! You have finally taken an amorphous idea from your brain and converted it into a functional MVPand it has got the attention it deserves. It’s a time for celebrations. But it’s only the first step.
While a successful MVP is an important milestone, it is best not to spend too much time celebrating. Once the MVP is a hit, it is ready to become a full-fledged product. While it can be tempting to add a ton of features and extra functionalities, it is best to pause before you rush to implement a whole backlog of ideas.
Eric Reis, the creator of the MVP concept states that ‘MVP is a process and not a product’, almost akin to a proof of concept that is needed to build a mature product. With the MVP being the first version of the dream product, here are a few things to consider before embarking on the mission of translating it into a fully-functional, mature product.
Developing a product evolution roadmap
MVPs contain the most basic product features necessary to only test the validity of your concept in the market. To develop it into a fully functional product that will see adoption and advocacy demands calibrated steps to identify the product needs and create a product evolution roadmap.
Development teams need to first identify the immediate product needs first. This is usually done based on user feedback and considerations over how user needs could evolve over time.
By taking this approach, development teams can make smart technology choices to enable change faster and capably roll out updates and upgrades effortlessly. By accommodating the changing scope of the product, development teams can foresee how the product will evolve and make technology considerations that enable easier and organic evolution.
Focusing on architectural considerations
Since an MVP has everything in the ‘minimum’ mode, looking at the architectural considerations of the final, mature product assumes critical importance. It is the software architecture that does a considerable amount of heavy lifting. Get this right and many issues such as making updates and upgrades etc., become easier, faster, and convenient. Get it wrong, and you’ll be struggling with performance issues and glitches for version after version.
Software architectures have also gone tremendous evolution. Today, instead of using the monolithic architecture pattern, developers can leverage microservices and serverless architectures.
Microservices give immense agility to application development and allow developers to build smaller, focused services that are clearly partitioned across functional boundaries. They are independently deployable and provide greater system resilience, interoperability on security and security mechanisms while allowing those services that are high in demand to be deployed separately across multiple servers for performance.
Serverless architectures are also becoming popular in the development landscape. Serverless allows development teams to build and run applications and services without having to manage infrastructure. These architectures are inherently more scalable and allow event-driven scaling, reduce latency issues, strengthen security, and are also cost-efficient since you are charged only for the number of executions and the size of the memory occupied
Evaluating technical debt and refactoring needs
The road to the MVP is inevitably riddled with shortcuts. It is essential to evaluate the accumulated technical debt before embarking on developing a fully functional product. It is important to ensure that we only accrue as much debt as we can pay off easily.
Determining the volume of technical debt and resolving it becomes an important point since not doing so can lead to spaghetti code and lingering challenges to performance and stability that lurk below the surface. These and other such issues can emerge at the most inopportune time and hurt product launch schedules. These can also make product evolution harder by making it more difficult to implement change later.
Ensuring that the codebase does not become clunky and outdated with refactoring also contributes to good product development. Refactoring enhances code design, optimizes performance, drives behavior-preserving transformations, improves code quality, and keeps technical debt in control
Factoring the mobile angle
With mobility becoming critical to software products, looking at the mobile angle and factoring in mobile needs is another crucial consideration. Customer expectations are moving towards any time/anywhere enablement. As such, being mobile-friendly becomes a contributor to product success.
Assessing the mobile angle, the design considerations, the technology needs, and dependencies become obvious next steps. Key consideration areas become the UI and UX with an additional focus on security. Highly intuitive interfaces, optimized navigation, and employing design thinking become important contributors to mobile success.
Assessing security considerations
With the treat landscape incrementally growing, product development must factor in tighter security for the application. Security now must be baked into the product to make it secure and reliable. Apart from having robust security and penetration testing, as more and more devices permeate the enterprise factoring in end-point security becomes essential.
Looking at zero-trust security models and having a defined security roadmap that keeps the application protected from all attacks and vulnerabilities contribute towards developing a fully functional, robust software product.
Apart from this, it is critical to determine the UI and UX angle to balance usability and security. It’s important to ensure that these functionalities employ standards that drive performance and enhance the product experience. This is especially important as distributed teams and hybrid work have become a reality now. Consumers are also aware of how they want to engage with software applications and want easy, seamless, intuitive experiences. Assessing how the end-user wants to engage with the product and accounting for all dependencies contribute to an elevated product experience. We have helped dozens of products and startups bridge the chasm between successful MVP and market-ready version 1. Talk to us to hear those stories.
