Empower Yourself to Redefine The MVP Scope
How to Expand the MVP Scope Collaboratively with Your Product Development Team
Introduction
MVP is not just a concept but a cornerstone in Lean UX. It involves delivering a functional solution — with only the necessary features that are technically feasible given the project’s resources and that serve the users based on business goals. The product should have just enough features to be considered operational.
When to Define MVP?
Once a business has decided upon the main features and learned about the market’s needs, agile working allows it to test and validate a product quickly and inexpensively.
Why MVP?
Implementing an MVP has many benefits, including the ability to iterate quickly and build upon it over time, making it more effective with each iteration. While expanding the MVP’s scope is necessary, other business objectives may prevent this from revisiting, a common frustration for designers.
How Do We Define MVP and Challenge Its Scope?
A technique for determining the MVP is MoSCoW, which involves collaboration between designers, product owners, and developers to sort and prioritise features based on their value and technical effort. By sorting features into Must-Have, Should-Have, Could-Have, and Won’t-Have categories, teams can make informed decisions about what to include in their MVP. Additionally, this exercise allows designers to challenge the product owner to expand the MVP scope, factoring in the estimated development time per feature.
Provided the scope cannot initially increase, validate gold-standard (Could Have and Won’t Have) solutions and prove their value for features to be revisited sooner, with tickets raised and more highly prioritised in the development backlog.
Summary
Despite the lack of exciting features implemented, developing products at MVP is a great way to maximise resources, work with agile methodologies, and allow for lots of experimentation. Most teams now work this way in product delivery, so it’s worth getting used to.
