Defining an MVP

A Betty Blocks approach to defining a minimum value product of your future application.

As all the primary ideas for building your low-code application with Betty Blocks are processed and validated with a company’s business goals, it’s time to come up with a bunch of features necessary to satisfy early customers and gather valuable feedback for upcoming iterations. Some of you may have guessed already - this second big step is all about defining the MVP or minimum value product - a concept used to describe the first version of an application with a basic set of features.

But why do we need to define the MVP of our future software product? The reasons behind this can be different. For example, it allows you to release your application sooner, save some money and leave space and resources for later development optimization after testing your product straight at the market. Without further speculations, let’s dive into the process of defining the MVP for your Betty Blocks application.

Listing all features

The first thing we need to do here is check on all features that were brought up during the ideation phase - both essential and ‘nice-to-have’. Define alignment between main problems and features aimed to solve them. Naturally, features are derived from problems.

Conducting a meeting with your stakeholders or target audience is essential at this stage. By involving them in the process, you can gain important insights into their needs and expectations. Here, at Betty Blocks, we offer the no-code application board to facilitate this meeting.

Being divided into five important columns, it allows us to define the target audience with their needs, application components that will be used to tackle problems, business goals that will allow you to gain profit, and success factors or selling points. State the expectations for the first version of the application approximately and proceed to the next step.

Prioritizing features

Once you’ve listed all potential features, you can start defining and prioritizing each one. There is a classic technique called MoSCoW (Must, Should, Could, and Won’t) that will help you prioritize the application features effectively, but we recommend sticking to ‘must’ and ‘should’ only at this stage. Pay close attention to the following nuances while reviewing the features:

• Evaluate each feature based on feasibility, impact on the problem you’re addressing, and alignment with your business goals

• Consider the time required to build each feature, distinguish between most time-saving and time-wasting features

• Continuously analyze and criticize the features list together with end users and developers to ensure you’re focusing on the right set of features

Again there’s a table recommended for prioritizing your list of features. It will help you to keep track of future functionality with its value, time needed, priority, and level of uncertainty. The latter one will state how fully we understand the feature: if the level of uncertainty is high, it means we don’t have an exact idea of how to implement it right now. Don’t add complex stuff that is beyond estimation early on.

The output of this step should be a refined list of selected epics and user stories. They will represent the overall functionality of your MVP version of the application. This list will serve as a guide throughout the development process and you will be coming back to it in the next iterations.

Wireframing

Even after continuous meetings and brainstorming, most of the stakeholders may still not have a clear understanding of what the future product is going to look like. That’s because most of the people are visual thinkers.

That’s why, to further define the structure and visualize the user experience, create a low-fidelity wireframe based on the ‘must-have’ features identified earlier. These wireframes can be built using very simple tools, like Figma or even Microsoft Paint! They shouldn’t be too complex, just make sure they provide a clear visual representation of your user stories.

Note: If you have more time and an available UX/UI designer, you can create an application prototype - a more complex representation of your future product. It’s possible to do this using the Betty Blocks platform’s page builder.

After the wireframes are done, share them with your users to gather feedback. It’s really important to continuously involve them in the process of app creation and wireframing is a valuable tool for making this happen. This validation process ensures that you’re building a product that meets the needs of your target audience. In future iterations, you can make all the necessary adjustments based on issues and concerns.

If time allows you to do so, after defining ‘must-have’ features, you can revisit the list of ‘should-have’ or ‘nice-to-have’ features and reprioritize them based on user feedback and available resources. Basically, you have to deliver value early on while allowing room for further additions - that is the main principle of defining the MVP.