When embarking on the journey of building and launching a digital product, you encounter various strategies. Each of these strategies comes with its own set of advantages, challenges, and suitability depending on your project’s unique requirements and goals. Navigating through these options requires a keen understanding of your target market, resources, and long-term vision, ensuring that the chosen approach aligns with your business objectives and user expectations.
For the sake of simplicity, we can categorize them into two main approaches:
- The MVP Approach: MVP, or Minimum Viable Product, involves crafting the simplest, most cost-effective, and least complex version of the product to demonstrate the concept’s viability. Typically, this method starts with formulating a hypothesis to achieve an attainable Key Performance Indicator (KPI) for the MVP.
- Polished Product Approach: In stark contrast to the MVP approach, the Polished Product Approach revolves around creating a meticulously designed product loaded with all the features and intricacies you believe are necessary to convert and retain customers.
The most significant contrast between these approaches lies in the assumptions you make when opting for the Polished Product Approach. This approach requires you to assume that all the features will harmoniously function together, and the user experience will be intuitive enough to prompt user actions and loyalty. While you can iterate in the Polished Product Approach, you run the risk of miscalculating some or most of your assumptions, potentially necessitating the removal of functionality and substantial user experience revisions.
In contrast, the MVP Approach entails building only the most basic version. If the Polished Product Approach involves ten features, the MVP usually includes just one or two features and a straightforward user experience. If mistakes are made, you can easily add more features or make minor adjustments, avoiding the need to strip away features or overhaul the user experience (instead you are layering on top of the experience).
An excellent example of a company that successfully employed the MVP approach is Facebook. When it debuted in 2004, Facebook offered only two features: friending people and viewing their profiles. That simplicity appealed to users within the same college, and Facebook gradually introduced additional features, such as the ability to post and a newsfeed. Launching a fully developed Facebook in 2023 might have made it less user-friendly and less likely to succeed.
Embracing Versioning: The Art of Iterative Improvement in Digital Products
Versioning is a crucial concept in digital product development. It involves revealing your initial offering, collecting user feedback, analyzing user data, and iterating to create an improved version. It’s like engaging in a conversation with the market, where you listen to market feedback, combine it with your instincts, and respond accordingly. The goal is to enhance KPIs like retention, conversion, and the all-important lifetime customer value (LTV).
Balancing Risk and Reward: The High Stakes of the Polished Product Approach
The Polished Product Approach can yield successful results, as seen with products like the iPhone. Apple took bold steps, made assumptions about user preferences, and included the Apple App Store in the first iPhone, which paid off handsomely. In contrast, adopting the MVP approach would have entailed launching without the App Store, gathering feedback, and potentially adding it in subsequent iterations.
However, when examining the startup landscape, one can find a graveyard of companies that opted for the Polished Product Approach and overspent their resources until they exhausted their funds. These startups invested more in their products than initially anticipated, leaving little room for other critical activities like A/B testing, future iterations, marketing, and sales.
The Polished Product Approach can succeed, but it tends to carry greater risks, whereas the MVP Approach, although it may take longer to fine-tune, is likely to save substantial costs in the long run.
Work with Valere
Choosing between the MVP and Polished Product approaches is a strategic decision, influenced by market dynamics, resource constraints, risk tolerance, and your overarching vision. The MVP approach, emphasizing iterative and user-centric development, contrasts with the potentially market-shaking impact of a well-implemented Polished Product strategy. Your choice should resonate with your business strategy, market insights, and your product’s distinct value proposition.
At Valere, our expertise lies deep within the realms of the project iteration process. We excel in leveraging the lean MVP approach to achieve market fit within optimized budgets. This prowess is a testament to our refined processes in both the discovery and build phases. Our commitment extends beyond project completion; we strive to nurture lasting partnerships founded on the success of our collaborative efforts.
Ready to embark on your next MVP journey with a team that aligns with your vision and accelerates your business objectives? Connect with Valere today and discover how our expertise can transform your concept into a market-ready software or application. Let’s innovate together and turn your ideas into impactful realities. Schedule a call with us now and take the first step towards your project’s success!
