The Stages of Product Validation

Although you may have a vision of your product in your mind. Be careful, it is always better to build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) before diving in with full functionality.

Customer Research

Before even building a MVP, it's important to speak to your prospective customers and understand whether your startup idea is going to serve a need for people. The best way to get insights is through face-to-face engagement with these prospective customers so that you can really gauge their responses and reaction when you are suggesting features and functionalities that you have ideated for your MVP or full product build. Once you've noticed a reaction or emotion you can then drill down further to understand exactly what the potential customer does or doesn't like about your idea and why they feel that way.

In particular, it's important to understand and gain insights into your customers' extreme emotions and feelings towards your startup concept. This means asking "What do you love most about this idea?" rather than "Do you like this idea?". Equally, it's important to ask "What do you hate most about this idea?". Although some respondents may get awkward when being asked these questions, especially without an MVP to trial it themselves, it's important that they answer. Getting these insights will help you start to scope out what you'll need to include and avoid when you do get to the stage of putting your MVP into customers hands.

Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

Once you've collected feedback from a range of potential users, it's time to release your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and get customers using your product or service. MVPs can be very basic and generally just need to validate one or two of the key concepts at the heart of your startup idea. Despite being basic, however, it is important to have a MVP which is actually "viable". This means it must actually serve the core purpose of your startup idea, even if it's done in a manual or non-technical way. The MVP of a car, for instance, could have been a skateboard. Although they are different in their features and composition, a skateboard offers a minimum viable form of transport - therefore testing whether there is a demand for people to travel more efficiently!

Using the example of a car, we can also look at misguided MVP builds. For a car, for instance, it would have been wrong to build a tyre as the MVP. Although a tyre is a feature of a car, it does not offer a form of transport individually and, therefore, a customer's reaction to the use of a tyre cannot be connected to their impression of a car. Using an individual feature to validate a concept can be the correct direction sometimes, but always be careful of simply producing a "stepping stone" to the full product.

The MVP does not need to have set timeframes or parameters, it depends hugely on each project. If you are quickly able to drive customers to the product, collect rich customer feedback and iterate towards product-market-fit then the MVP may only last a few weeks or a couple of months. However, often it takes much longer to get users onto the MVP than first planned. MVPs can regularly last 6 months to a year. The most important thing is to use the customer feedback and insights to shape the direction of the MVP, rather than simply building the product based on your own vision.

Similarly, if the MVP proves that the product is not serving a purpose to customers do not be afraid to pivot or even reassess whether you want to continue past MVP-stage.

Full Product

Once the MVP has provided ample customer feedback to give you direction on your business concept, it is time to build the full product out.

As you can imagine, this involves collating all the customer feedback from your research and customer feedback at MVP stage to scope exactly what needs to be in the product but also bringing in optimisations to ensure the customer journey is as smooth and appealing as possible.

Although it's named "Full Product, you should never perceive your product to be complete. The best businesses continue to iterate and modify their offering even when they pass MVP stage. This means continuing to collect customer feedback and, more importantly, to act on your customers sentiments!