Minimum Viable Product

8.0 Minimum Viable Product

In contemporary product management parlance, a MVP (or Minimum Viable Product), should result in a product that can be used in the field, performing some level of identifiable and agreed minimal functionality that progresses toward an ever ‘richer’ experience.

From the outset, priorities that stakeholders consider the most valuable to make available in the nearest term should be transformed into ‘user stories’ that are written from the user’s point of view. These practices are derived from the ‘Agile’ project management methodology.

The user stories seen in Appendix 3: MVP User stories are descriptions of the required functionality derived from the user experience prototypes illustrated earlier in this proposal (see §7.1 Experience prototypes and Appendix 1: Expanding Experience). Ultimately these functions and
other ideas within this document may provide a basis for the addition of further functionality. This in turn may also respond to ongoing user and stakeholder feedback.

This cycle establishes a tighter relationship between designers, developers, users and stakeholders in the production environment. Ideally the product moves from a ‘beta’ version MVP and towards the anticipated ‘complete’ product.

When the Prepare Wellington MVP is in an operational environment (and hence utilising a responsive map) it will make relationship between situation and context easier for users to understand, as well as their needs and feedback as proposed in the design of this experience.

The resilience of the experience for any publicly accessible MVP is paramount. Typically, this is where much of the short term investment should fall. To achieve this resilience (considering the extreme use contexts required), any server side architecture should be scaleable. Ideally the Prepare Wellington MVP should provide some value if a crisis occurs while it is constantly being improved, moving towards some of the opportunities described in this proposal.

As this design research proposal has established experience benchmarks for the form of Prepare Wellington, it can now be built and tested to see if the product performs as the designers anticipated. Under the guidance of WREMO and using the MVP User stories created as one of the results of this research proposal, the first version MVP is currently being built by the design and development agency 3Months (www.3months.com) in Wellington.