A balanced minimal viable product (MVP) is the holy grail in lean startup method. But so few companies achieve this. They go to one or the other extreme. Either the product is lacking any valuable functionality. So nobody wants to buy it. Or the product is feature packed. But the risk is that it is not useful. Because product development happened without getting enough feedback from users. Some estimates say that 90% of startups fail because they don’t understand how to launch a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).

A minimum viable product (MVP) is a basic version of a product that has just enough features for early customers to use and give feedback. The aim is to save time, effort, and money by testing the market before developing a full and robust product. Early adopters provide feedback to help hone product development. You want to avoid developers wasting time on unnecessary work. This approach helps to confirm assumptions. It also reduces the risk of investing in a product that may not meet user needs.

It’s a real delicate balancing act. The MVP needs to address essential user needs. While also keeping the product development scope minimal. Because the product needs to be valuable enough that customers would actually pay for it. It needs to have just enough features to be usable by early customers. You of course want to avoid creating useless products!

But you also don’t want to invest in creating a completely robust product. At least not until you have feedback from customers and validation that your product has a market.

How to create a balanced minimal viable product

How do you create a balanced minimal viable product given these competing needs? Two things to focus on to nail your MVP;

Step 1 – Recognize what your users  need by understanding their main challenges. Concentrate on the essential features that solve these problems. Skip second-tier features and keep it simple. Avoid unnecessary complexity that doesn’t solve the core issue.

Step 2 – Try out the MVP with a small group, collect feedback, and then make improvements. This ongoing process fine-tunes features based on real user experiences.

Start creating more balanced minimum viable products. The benefits will be faster time to market with products that users will actually want to buy.