The Limits of a “Ship It Fast” Mentality

Creating digital products often feels like a race against budget and time. To meet these constraints, development teams often create and release a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), a version including only the essentials, meant to evolve over time with subsequent releases. This strategy can save budget and get you to production faster, but MVPs often leave users, stakeholders, and the development team dissatisfied.  

What Went Wrong?

In the rush to ship core functionality, an essential part of successful online experience is often ignored: a user-centered strategy. Up-front research, careful definition, and an intentional focus on the real people who use the product are forgone (or not even considered). Without this, products are little more than bundles of functionality that development teams hope will be accepted by the market.  

What Happens Without a User-Centered Strategy?

When development teams lack a user-centered approach, they are sure to face the following challenges.

Decisions are based on guesswork.

Without a clear understanding of users, the project’s foundation is built on guesses and assumptions. Functionality is designed around stakeholders, decision-makers, and developers’ opinions—that is,  their sense of what the customer wants. None of these parties truly know how users will approach or respond to the product.

High-level requirements are often incomplete or incorrect.

Digital products are only as good as their business or technical requirements. If these requirements lack user-centered insights, the product will suffer. Unfortunately, requirements are often dominated by internal imperatives, pre-conceived notions of “the right” functionality, and devoid of any connection to real users. This can cause development teams to spend time on low-value features or, worse, ship a product that lacks basic usability.

Key inputs are usually missing.

Development teams are mostly comprised of, well, developers. They’re focused on solving one question: How do we quickly create baseline functionality and get it to the market? For these teams, the MVP strategy answers this question perfectly. This approach is dominated by the traditional development team model, which lacks both inputs and methods for creating solid user experiences. UX strategists, digital product designers, and content strategists are almost always missing from development teams. When nobody on the team can advocate for users, then there is no means in place to make a usable product.

UX problems are difficult to fix.  

In theory, inevitable product issues or limitations of an MVP are addressed with subsequent releases. However, fundamental user experience flaws, a common feature of MVPs, are sticky and nearly impossible to undo after launch. Development teams are left with two non-ideal choices: Either spend significant resources trying to fix usability problems or live with the consequences of their mistakes.

Redefining the Bare Minimum

Real people don’t notice or care about your software release plan. They don’t see your MVP as a work in progress. All they know is they’re frustrated with your product. A user-centered strategy sets the groundwork needed for your MVP to properly succeed out the gate and provides a foundation to properly evolve after launch. You can create a far better minimum viable product that ships on time and is designed for users from the outset by redefining your bare minimum.

Research users and their needs first.

Development should not begin until you spend time with the real people who will use your product. Don’t simply rely on customer wish lists (they will often push you in the wrong direction). If you are using an Agile methodology, do user research in a Discovery sprint before moving through your usual process. Observe how your users’ work. Seek to understand their real tasks and workarounds. Even a small amount of up-front time spent with users will bring you tremendous insight into their needs and drastically reduce product guesswork.

Author clear goals and objectives.

MVP requirement discussions can be dominated by opinionated team members or powerful stakeholders. Your team needs formal, user-centered product goals and objectives to guide inevitable development debates and to protect your first release from poor usability decisions. 

Creating goals and objectives is not as difficult as you might think. You simply need a practical method and pattern for doing so that accounts for both business and user needs. A brief, user-centered goals and objectives document, co-written by your business analyst and UX strategist, will be your North Star. Use them to judge what should and should not be a part of an MVP.

Bring a user-centered focus to your iterative process.

If you want your MVP to succeed with users, you must change the way you build. This means adjusting your agile process. Early user research and baseline documentation (personas, user journeys, etc.) should be led by UX professionals before formal development iterations begin.

User experience work should always be a few steps (e.g., 1-3 sprints) ahead of development. This allows for proper user-centered groundwork (e.g., user stories, wireframes, high-level UX requirements), all based on your excellent user-centered goals and objectives, of course.

During rolling feature-by-feature development, UX strategists, product designers, and content strategists will provide on-the-spot input and guidance to developers when inevitable issues, changes, or questions come up. This approach gives your MVP the fighting chance it needs.

Test your work with users before launch.

There are many ways to get your work in front of users before launch. Some teams test low-fidelity wireframes to see if they’re on the right track. Others test more complete features as a final check before launch. Your team can test however works best for you—all that matters is that you’re testing with real users.

User tests don’t need to be expensive or time-intensive. Create a prioritized list of what you want to test. Find real users and observe them trying to complete tasks (remotely or in person). Note where they struggle or what works well. This approach will help you identify problems, fix bugs, or prioritize updates before your product hits the market.

Rethink your product team.

Supplement your traditional development team with user experience roles. If all you can afford is one usability expert, that’s a good start. One expert is better than none. Over time, expand your team to multiple user experience professionals (hopefully as permanent additions to the team) to leverage the expertise of various disciplines for more lasting success.

An MVP That Puts Users First

Releasing a minimum viable product can be a solid approach to the market—but not if your process is devoted to speed rather than your users.

When you commit to a user-centered strategy, you demand more than quick-ship functionality from your MVP. You demand speed and quality. Your initial release won’t just be minimal, it will be loved. You’ll set yourself up for easier to define and implement subsequent releases, and you won’t have to waste resources on heavy revisions to usability failures. Ultimately, when you build on a solid foundation, you forge an enviable competitive position that will stand the test of time and support your future endeavors.