Bare minimum

Having a massive project to deliver in record time certainly tests my blogging discipline! Managing multiple web agencies to deliver a new corporate website, combined with an ambitious home extension project, means I have little room in my life (and brain) for much else.

So it's a good job that we're only delivering an Minimum Viable Product (MVP) on website launch. That should make the pre-launch much less intense right? Well, only if we're clear about what this actually means...

When done properly a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a great way of building user-centric digital services in a fraction of the time. The idea is to get something basic to market (i.e the shell of a website) as soon as possible and to start testing. You can then use all of the feedback gathered to continue to develop it long into the future.

The classic analogy here is that of a skateboard as a precursor to a Ferrari. It's basic but perfectly usable and It lowers the cost of development because you only build what people will use. The ultimate goal being that this leads to a more desirable product because it gives people exactly what they need. As developers we don’t end up paying for features that just clutter the experience.

But the danger when commissioning an MVP is that despite saying this is what we want what we actually expect is a fully blown, fully featured, PHAT website. Essentially we're only calling it an MVP because we're trying to get it developed in the shortest possible time at a low-cost.

Our users will NOT be happy with a skateboard while expecting Customer Experience provided by a red Italian convertible.

"Perhaps a better term is Minimum Lovable Product. A bicycle is a lovable and useful product for somebody with no better means of transport, but is still very far from the motorcycle that it will evolve into" - Henrik Kniberg in “How Spotify builds products

Users have to love it but time-to-market or time-to-value have to also be short. And of course our MVP has to be cheap. Can it be done? Can we develop a great quality product in a very short time at a low budget?

This is not an easy ask and those familiar with the project management triangle will know that something has to give. This pits time, cost and scope against each other and states that you have to pick two of the three. So what do we sacrifice? Buy ourselves more time? Increase the cost? Or reduce the scope?

So this brings this post up to date as to where we're at with our MVP website project. Negotiating our project scope to optimize product budget, timeline and quality. Of course, this requires a lot of heated discussion and healthy debate. But so has every successful project I've ever worked on! MVP is just the first milestone of the long journey.

Whilst on the subject of successful projects, we spent this Wednesday evening at the Drum Marketing Awards in London. This was the to be the first appearance of our 'Shaping Your World' campaign on such a grand stage. Whilst I had attended the CIM awards a few years ago just being shortlisted in the same category as Spotify and Dropbox was a massive achievement for us.

This meant I was even more nervous than usual and even though we didn't bring home the trophy I found it a great networking opportunity. We were sat next to the fellow marketers from LADbible and the BBC and made sure we gave each other lots of support.

This won't be the last high-profile event where we'll be representing either with lots on the horizon. Before we can draw breath we'll be off to the CIPR Excellence awards this Wednesday. Time for me to up my sleep game and start getting to bed at a reasonable hour in preparation...
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