How Successful Scrum Teams Deliver a Minimum Viable Product?

When analyzed under Scrum and other Agile methodologies, MVP or minimum viable product commonly present different points. This happens particularly when it comes to verifying whether a product that is being developed meets the requirements of end users. Before understanding how successful Scrum teams deliver a minimum viable product, it is better first to understand these two concepts:

What is Scrum?

Scrum is a popular Agile framework that uses the concepts of Sprints or short cycles. These cycles generally last for a week or two to maintain the cadence of a team. So, any organization that follows Scrum should begin with a planning meeting or Sprint Planning. Also, it is recommended that each Sprint should end with a meeting to review the tasks done. This is referred to as Sprint Review.

Further, an event should be held in every Sprint. It is referred to as retrospective, and its objective is to improve the process and delivery. It also involves communication between people. There is also the Daily Sprint. It is a regular meeting for evaluating the progress of the work planned for the Sprint.

MVP – A Basic Understanding:

MVP or Minimum Viable Product is a product that has been minimally developed but continues to meet market requirements. It is used to test ideas faster and affordably before investing a lot of resources and time into developing something bigger.

In Scrum, MVP as a concept denotes a product with sufficient features to quickly meet customers' requirements. Also, Scrum insists on providing space for customers to give their feedback on a product. In turn, the product's future can be shaped to meet customers' demands efficiently. The real value of MVP depends on the learning opportunities it offers. As against including all the features that you think will help users in a single iteration, you will do it in stages or Sprints. In this process, you will get feedback from customers to ensure the inclusion of features that they expect. In short, as against following a lengthy process that carries the risk of errors, you will follow short processes. So, errors will reduce considerably.

Advantages of Starting with MVP:

When your Scrum teams take steps to deliver the Minimum Viable Product, here are the benefits your team can get:

• Betterment in Launch Speed: 

When you deliver products with features based on the customer's feedback alone without adding many features that you feel are necessary, you can ensure that the product reaches the market quickly.

• Flexibility:

In Scrum you can release the product as and when you add a new feature  and need to wait for the final product. With this, customers can test while your team works on delivering the final product.

• Better Products:

When your team works on the final product, they can learn about customers' expectations through feedback for the previous release. It means the chances of delivering something people do not want reduce significantly.

Why Scrum Uses MVP?

When you take the case of the traditional Waterfall approach, developing a product to completion before taking it into end-users hands is like building custom software. However, this method contributed to budget issues. It even led to the production of products that were already outdated at the time of launch. It even made organizations face the unhappiness of customers.

On the other hand, in Scrum, MVP is followed. Due to this, organizations can release updates regularly. Also, the  product development teams can learn along the journey. Also, they give importance to developing products that confirm users’ needs. They avoid including unwanted features.

Bringing Together Scrum and MVP:

Scrum and MVP can be combined in five phases:

• Analyzing the present situation

• Moving toward the goal

• Review and validating the outcomes

• Make the required changes based on what you have learned

• Getting back to the starting point and start a fresh cycle of improvements.

Successful Scrum Teams follow the steps mentioned above to deliver a Minimum Viable Product. 

Ways to Determine MVP:

You can determine what should be part of your MVP in many ways. Also, using one of the following ways, you can spot when your MVP is ready for user testing:

• Conducting interviews with potential users

• Observing the products of competitors

• Carrying out usability studies

• Surveying existing customers

• Gathering analytics.

In short, to achieve the MVP, you should spot why you are building a particular product, what you are building, and for whom you are building it.

After that, with the help of Scrum, the team should create a backlog with appropriate prioritization. The prioritization should be based on stakeholder input, user feedback, existing analytics, and data and research. This prioritized backlog can be sorted in different ways, like the below

Need Vs. Want:

The MVP should only encompass items with the label as needed. The features or products under the ‘nice to have’ and ‘want’ categories can wait.

Urgent Vs. Important:

When you understand the issues and priorities of your probable users, you can spot what is genuinely crucial without being distracted by items that show themselves as urgent.

How Do Scrum Teams Deliver A Minimum Viable Product?

Scrum Teams can achieve Minimum Viable Product by following a set of procedures. Here are the steps they follow:

Beginning with Market Research:

At times, ideas will not meet the market's needs. So, before an idea is initiated, Scrum Teams will conduct thorough market research. They do this to ensure the idea will fulfill the market requirements. Conducting a survey is the best idea to spot market requirements. The more information a business has, the better the chances of succeeding. Here, it is equally important to know what is being offered by competitors and how to make your product stand out.

Idea on Value Addition:

The Scrum Team also evaluates what the new product offers its users. In short, how users can benefit from the product is an important question to be answered at this stage. Finding the correct answer to this question will help define the product's value proposition. It is equally important to gain a clear idea of what the critical estimations are for the product. MVP denotes that the product has to introduce value to people at the fundamental level. You can start by spotting the users and building the MVP based on their requirements.

Map Out User Flow:

The design process is the crucial MVP stage. It means that the product should be designed to be convenient for users. Only then will it be possible to make the product an MVP. Your organization or team should see the product from the users' perspective. User flow should also be given the utmost importance at this stage.

Defining the user flow is crucial to spot the stages of the process. It is important to detail the steps required to reach the key objective. The attention should be on fundamental tasks users will do with the product. These are goals that the users will have when they try out a product.

Prioritizing Features:

At this stage, a Scrum Organization will prioritize all the features that the MVP will support. To give importance to the MVP features, it is better to ask questions like what the users require and whether this product offers them some benefits.

Following this, categorizing all the rest of the MVP features should be done. This should be done based on low, medium, and high priority. Following this, these features should be arranged in the order of priority in the product backlog. At this stage, MVP begins. If your business wishes to know what its future product will look like, you can prepare an MVP Prototype at this stage.

Launching MVP:

Once your business decides upon the key features and understands the market requirements, it can create the MVP. 

Exercise – Build, Measure, and Learn:

At this stage, you should define the scope of the work. Then, you can take the product to the development phase. After reaching this phase, the product must move to the testing phase. The initial testing phase should be done by quality assurance engineers, who will work towards improving the quality of the product.

After the launch of MVP, restart every step again. You should get feedback from your clients on the release. You can spot the competitiveness and acceptance of your goods in the market based on the comments they get.