Product / Market Alignment

What needs to be in our MVP? How can we test if customers really want this before building? How can we start building before we’ve decided all the details of what to build?

The start of a product’s lifecycle can seem like a bewildering, panicked game of “chicken and egg”, and one with insanely high stakes. How can you start when you need to decide what to build before you start building? What if you pump six figures of effort into something only to find out nobody will buy it? [Beware: This happens. A LOT.]

The short answer is: You need to take small steps, and take them very quickly and very often.

What does this mean in practice? It means: build briefly, release to friends, get feedback, refine your goals. Build a bit more, release a bit wider, get feedback. Refine your goals. And so on. Every single week.

You need people to SEE “it” to find out if ”it” will work. But the one thing you should do under absolutely NO circumstances is to set out from Day One with a big, detailed product in mind. It’ll take longer than you think; you won’t have thought of everything (no, really, you won’t) and when you arrive at “the end” you still have no actual proof that people will even use your amazing product, or know how to.

This is why the single most important decision that you will ever make for your organisation is to handle delivery in a truly Agile fashion.

At MCBH Cloud Software we are 100% truly Agile in approach. Adopting this for your product will help you validate your ideas continually, from the very start while ensuring the project stays flexible enough to respond swiftly to any lessons learned and even to pivots desired as a result, week by week.

Get in touch to set up a free face-to-face, to get advice on how best to start your unique journey: contact@mcbh.co.uk