Keep it lean - with MVP

We do quite a bit of start-up web work.

It can be exciting stuff, working from the client’s early idea, through to prototypes, through to building the application and launching it.

Wiliam is by no means a lean approach to building a start-up however; start-ups begin in garages and bedrooms whilst their founders subsist on Cheerios and complimentary Burger King Coke refills.

Instead, we serve a certain type of ‘start-up’; the sort that is begun by an established media company or an insurance company; or where the client is well backed through doesn’t have or yet want internal development capabilities.

Just because our start-up clients drink espresso and have moved out of home does not make the principles behind building their start-up any different however.

Whether you’re starting up – bedroom or boardroom – or have a growing online business, thinking like a lean start-up really is the only way you should think.

Certainly, if you’re not thinking that way, your competitors will be.

 

Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

The concept of Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is about as lean as you can get.

In fact, it’s so lean that MVP suggests that you’re not even sure if your idea – whether a whole business idea or an addition to an existing website – has legs.

MVP is there to prove your idea good or not; to take feedback from users and to either keep developing or to can the idea.

To that extent, MVP sees only the development of those features that are critical to have something deployed and no more.

Generally speaking, the product you have developed is only deployed to a group of users to allow you to gain feedback and direction, though that is not to say that the lean-principals of MVP can’t be used to guide the development of any new website feature for public (beta) launch.

It makes no sense not to be lean. It makes no sense to develop anything that isn’t but what you need to launch.

As with a car, the only thing that slows it down is weight.

Be lean and develop nothing by the minimum you require.

You and your web developer will be much better friends and for much longer.

And your start-up or online business will fare much better.