Minimum Viable Product Design & Development

Overview

As you plan to start up a new business, Epic Labs can support you by designing and creating a great digital product, and do it timely and fully aligned to the model and customer experience you are building.

What’s the challenge and approach

You are creating a new business supported by a digital product. Your business model is based on user experience where subjectivity and emotional response need to be assessed and taking into account to make the product nice to consume.
Epic Labs will help and lead you across the process of creating a digital product following Lean Startup techniques. These are some highlights of the process:

Product Strategy
Conduct the necessary market research including a competitive analysis and how the product could fit into the market.
User research, including interviews and surveys as needed, to understand firsthand what are the users’ impressions, desires, challenges, experiences on the problem we are solving.

Product Definition
In this part of the process we will turn the product strategy into technical requirements.
We will define the personas or user profiles that will consume the product, define the user stories or how each user persona will consume the product, this will give the architects insight into the product features.
The goal of this part of the process is to create a preliminary architecture, set of technologies and roadmap of the product; and the backlog prioritization to create the Minimum Viable Product (MVP).

Product Development
The MVP defined the bare minimum functionalities, user stories, user interfaces for the users to capture the core experience and value we want our potential users to be exposed.
The Software Engineer team will work to develop and create this MVP that will help to validate whether or not, the digital product that we are building, delivers the experience and value it was designed for.
The MVP should be delivered with great speed, to allow for quick iterations and don’t become a bottleneck of the innovation process; and great quality so, when users are exposed to the product, the technology and the product itself delivers according to the value and experience it was created for.
The process of creating a new line of business, business model or experience is costly in time and investment. If a product is created to validate that models and the users don’t find value on it, there is nothing more frustrating than not knowing whether they didn’t find value because the model was not right or appropriate or because the product did not have the quality for them to really grasp the experience of the new model we are trying to create.
During the product development phase, we leverage our Epic Agile software development methodology supported by strong DevOps and Continuous Integration. This allows for quick and high quality iterations of product development and great visibility to our customers on what is the progress, development velocity, the tasks backlog priority, how those could be changed if the product design needs to steer or pivot according to the users feedback and business needs.

User Interface & User Experience
Finally, UI/UX designed work hand in hand with software engineers to build and appropriate interface and experience according to users’ expectations.

Iteration
Once the MVP has been exposed to the users, it is time to measure again and check if the users are getting what they are expiring, if the model works we keep evolving the product with additional user stories and functionality.
If it doesn’t we pivot by changing some of the hypothesis and create a new MVP to then measure again and check if we got it right this time. This is an iterative process.

What is included

• Design thinking sessions to conduct the product strategy assessment, identify user personas and needs.
• Market research, competitive analysis and user research.
• Product definition leading to product architecture, roadmaps, MVP definition and backlog.
• Product development: leveraging Epic Agile software development methodologies,
• DevOps & CI, for great quality product development and rapid iterations.
• User Interface and User Experience implementation for product readiness.