Choosing the Right Path: MVP Approach vs. Polished Product Approach
By: Guy Pistone
When embarking on the journey of building and launching a digital product, you encounter various strategies. Each of these strategies comes with its own set of advantages, challenges, and suitability depending on your project’s unique requirements and goals. Navigating through these options requires a keen understanding of your target market, resources, and long-term vision, ensuring that the chosen approach aligns with your business objectives and user expectations.
For the sake of simplicity, we can categorize them into two main approaches:
- The MVP Approach: MVP, or Minimum Viable Product, involves crafting the simplest, most cost-effective, and least complex version of the product to demonstrate the concept’s viability. Typically, this method starts with formulating a hypothesis to achieve an attainable Key Performance Indicator (KPI) for the MVP.
- Polished Product Approach: In stark contrast to the MVP approach, the Polished Product Approach revolves around creating a meticulously designed product loaded with all the features and intricacies you believe are necessary to convert and retain customers.
The most significant contrast between these approaches lies in the assumptions you make when opting for the Polished Product Approach. This approach requires you to assume that all the features will harmoniously function together, and the user experience will be intuitive enough to prompt user actions and loyalty. While you can iterate in the Polished Product Approach, you run the risk of miscalculating some or most of your assumptions, potentially necessitating the removal of functionality and substantial user experience revisions.
In contrast, the MVP Approach entails building only the most basic version. If the Polished Product Approach involves ten features, the MVP usually includes just one or two features and a straightforward user experience. If mistakes are made, you can easily add more features or make minor adjustments, avoiding the need to strip away features or overhaul the user experience (instead you are layering on top of the experience).
An excellent example of a company that successfully employed the MVP approach is Facebook. When it debuted in 2004, Facebook offered only two features: friending people and viewing their profiles. That simplicity appealed to users within the same college, and Facebook gradually introduced additional features, such as the ability to post and a newsfeed. Launching a fully developed Facebook in 2023 might have made it less user-friendly and less likely to succeed.
Embracing Versioning: The Art of Iterative Improvement in Digital Products
Versioning is a crucial concept in digital product development. It involves revealing your initial offering, collecting user feedback, analyzing user data, and iterating to create an improved version. It’s like engaging in a conversation with the market, where you listen to market feedback, combine it with your instincts, and respond accordingly. The goal is to enhance KPIs like retention, conversion, and the all-important lifetime customer value (LTV).
Balancing Risk and Reward: The High Stakes of the Polished Product Approach
The Polished Product Approach can yield successful results, as seen with products like the iPhone. Apple took bold steps, made assumptions about user preferences, and included the Apple App Store in the first iPhone, which paid off handsomely. In contrast, adopting the MVP approach would have entailed launching without the App Store, gathering feedback, and potentially adding it in subsequent iterations.
However, when examining the startup landscape, one can find a graveyard of companies that opted for the Polished Product Approach and overspent their resources until they exhausted their funds. These startups invested more in their products than initially anticipated, leaving little room for other critical activities like A/B testing, future iterations, marketing, and sales. The Polished Product Approach can succeed, but it tends to carry greater risks, whereas the MVP Approach, although it may take longer to fine-tune, is likely to save substantial costs in the long run.
Work with Valere
Choosing between the MVP and Polished Product approaches depends on various factors, including market dynamics, resource availability, risk appetite, and long-term vision. While the MVP approach offers a more iterative, user-focused development path, the Polished Product approach can make a significant market impact if executed well. Ultimately, the decision should align with your business strategy, market understanding, and the unique value proposition of your product.
Here at Valere, if there’s one thing we understand completely, it is the project iteration process. We specialize in optimizing budget and the lean MVP approach to proven market fit. This is completely attributed to our process across the discovery and build phase. We are completely devoted to the success of our projects in the hopes of establishing a long-term relationship.
Are you looking for an experienced partner for your next MVP? Schedule a call with us today to learn how we can help your team create the perfect software or application that can Accelerate Your Business Goals!
Valere is an award-winning digital transformation, innovation, and software development company. As an expert-vetted, top 1% agency on Upwork, Valere has re-invented the way software design and development agencies operate — mitigating issues related to communication and process inefficiencies while partnering with clients to architect the right solution for the right problem.
Valere utilizes emerging technology in machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to enable startups and enterprise businesses alike to execute, launch, and scale their vision, transform organizations, and build something meaningful.
Valere has built over 300 successfully launched applications –ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies! Valere has experience developing for both consumer and B2B audiences across a myriad of verticals such as healthcare, finance, sports, fitness, education, and more!
Valere has a successful track record of building applications that have yielded millions in revenue, downloads, and Venture Capital — while also getting apps featured by the New York Times, Apple App Store top featured apps, TechRadar and Google Play Store top featured apps!
The Valere team consists of expert engineers, project managers, designers, and quality assurance specialists, with offices in the United States, India, Croatia, Peru, and Uruguay.
Schedule a call with us today to learn how we can help your team create the perfect software or application that can Accelerate Your Business Goals!
