Minimum Viable Product (MVP) or Maximum Value Product

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Complete an MVP for your design idea prior to our Thursday, Jan 25 class session.

Create a description of the features of your Minimum Viable Product (MVP), based on the brainstorming and selection activities during our class session.

You should continue ideating within other designers to refine vision of the essential features of the product that you'll be proposing, then itemize those features — the absolute must-haves — in your MVP description.

You'll be using this MVP to guide your detailed design of the product your design team is proposing as a solution to the needs you've identified. And the features that you've identified as essential will the be the ones that will be most important to prototype and test during the next phase of the design thinking process.

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Minimum Viable Product (MVP) - Tips

Using a Idea Tree / Mindmap to Record Your Ideating Process

Create a tree diagram that maps out your thinking process as you move from a POV statement to specific features ideas.

Start with your POV statement at the left side.
In the middle column, list as many strategies as you can by asking “How might we…” questions.

In this phase, we’re using Divergent thinking to come up with a vey broad list of all the alternative strategies that might be use to address the need identified in your POV.
Note that as you building out your tree, some answers to “How might we…” questions may lead to additional “How might we…” questions as you dig into various ways to implement that strategy.

As you move to the right, start listing specific Feature ideas that might be part of implementing a Strategy branch.

You don’t need to fully flesh out all the Strategy branches.
Focus on the branches that you decide are the most attractive strategies.

After you’ve used Divergent thinking to building out a very rich tree of options, shift to Convergent thinking to identify the feature ideas that seem the most promising to implement as part of your design.

These feature ideas can come from several different branches of the tree.
A good solution often uses several strategies synergistically in parallel to help meet the needs.
Draw a box around all of the feature ideas that you’d like to include in your design.

Identify the MOST ESSENTIAL feature ideas for meeting the needs identified in your POV statement. These very short list of absolutely essential features will be you Minimum Viable Product.
Thinking ahead to our next phase - Testing - identify a few questions that you’d like to get feedback on from other students. What specific questions would be helpful to share with others to get some feedback that will help you decide upon how to proceed with your design?
Post an image of your POV > Strategies > Features > MVP tree in your Design Journal posting here: