How Minimum Viable Products & Features Helped Me Write My New Book
A minimum viable product (MVP) is often mistaken as the first general release of a product, the initial offering that is good enough to address the early market. But for most products, an MVP should be a much earlier and cruder version that acts as a learning device — a means to test a crucial assumption and make the right product decision. This post shows how I used MVPs and MVFs — minimum viable features — to write my latest book, Strategize.
Minimum Viable Product #1
Writing a book is a complex and at times challenging endeavour: it took me over two years to write and publish my latest book. As I had to commit a substantial amount of my time to the project (and my company’s money), I tried to reduce the risk of writing a book that nobody really wants and needs. At the same time, I wanted to test that the product would create enough value for its readers before writing the actual book. Using an MVP helped me address this challenge.
My first MVP had little resemblance with the finished product: I used my product strategy and roadmap workshop as the initial minimum viable product. This helped me better understand which strategy and roadmap-related challenges product managers commonly experience and which advice is helpful for them. Taking into account the questions and feedback of the attendees allowed me to refine the book’s value proposition — and improve the workshop. What’s more, writing the book helped me consolidate and deepen my product strategy and roadmap knowledge and thereby benefited my teaching.
Minimum Viable Product #2
While the workshop helped me validate the need the book should address, I was not able to tackle another key risk with it: writing the book in the right way so that the need was properly met and the product sufficiently differentiated. My second MVP helped me with this challenge.
In September 2014, I had a first version of the book available for review — MVP number two. The feedback I received was mixed. There were some encouraging reviews but also some critical ones. In hindsight, I am particularly grateful for the invalidating feedback. While I can find it difficult to deal with, the critical feedback helps me learn the most.
As a consequence, I reworked the book: I moved away from trying to tell a cohesive story about creating an effective strategy and actionable roadmap for a sample product featuring selected tools and techniques. Instead, I opted for a broader collection of related strategy and roadmap tips. This increased the scope of the book and made it applicable to a larger number of products. But it required me to cover additional topics — something I tackled by using minimum viable features.
Read On …
To read the rest of this article and access the remaining tips, please head over to my website: https://www.romanpichler.com/blog/minimum-viable-product-mvp-minimum-viable-feature/
Learn More
To learn more about how minimum viable products helped me write my book, attend my Product Strategy and Roadmap training course and read my book Strategize.
Source: http://www.romanpichler.com/blog/minimum-viable-product-mvp-minimum-viable-feature/
