Don't be a Homer — Your guide to creating an MVP

Software development gives the freedom for users minds to race. 
For a savvy entrepreneur, this allows agile development that is responsive to the real needs of users and real demands of a market. You build as you go; everything you need, nothing you don’t. Imagine how helpful this could be in picking out your next car –

Maybe you’re like me. Maybe you don’t need the extra space for soccer practice, PTA meetings and other joys of parenthood, but in the future you most likely will. If building cars were like building technology that two-door sporty thing you’re ogling at could easily be turned into a minivan when the time called for it.

You’ve likely heard about the concept of the Minimum Viable Product or MVP. The idea is to build the simplest solution that satisfies the business and user needs — then go from there. Don’t focus on getting that first release pixel perfect and functionally flawless; focus on your business objectives and keep improving the product to align with those objectives, release after release.

The MVP concept can be difficult because it involves defining what’s the most important, and what’s less important. Doing it well involves a methodical and agile software development process something like the following:

  • Create an idea, with a vision statement with goals and objectives
  • Design a product that fits the above vision and helps reach goals and achieve objectives
  • Build a featureset that will be your core features
  • From each core feature, plan out a set of sub-features that enhance these and which phase of development they’ll be built in (not phase 1)0
  • Build a backlog containing previously thrown out features. Review this last when planning out a future phase
  • After the MVP has been live for a bit, take a look at how users are responding and if new things pop up that are relevant
  • If new issues can be solved or value-adds can be implemented, add these responsive features to a backlog
  • Plan out future phases using a combination of the backlog and sub-feature enhancements to the core functionality

When building best online casino projects up in the creative clouds, it’s easy to let things like deadlines, budgets and implementation slip to our peripherals. The MVP helps here in using a phased approach to piece by piece form a final product. Killing an idea that was slated for the later phase is a whole lot cheaper than coding over something that was already built as part of a large first release but doesn’t seem too useful now.

Most importantly, MVP’s make for better projects. As we see with Mr. Simpson’s Automotive endeavor, more is not always better. This means twice as much with mobile, where shorter attention spans and smaller screen sizes require sleek and simple design and fast functional use-cases.

Keeping things simple initially is the best route to rolling out a successful website, app or piece of software. Using phased development helps hammer in an understanding of what the core use case and have that be the driving force for your initiative. It’s easy to think each and every feature is “absolutely mandatory” if the goal is to be perfect on the first roll-out. Using an MVP eases that stress and helps you be agile in creating something great.

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