Congratulations! Your Boss just gave you approval to build the website you’ve been pitching to them for the past year. A budget has been approved, and you have an enthusiastic team eager to get started. Nothing can stop you… until you receive the deadline for when the website has to go live. It’s much earlier than you planned and there just simply isn’t enough hours in the day, or resources available to make it happen. Whatever will you do?
Let me introduce you to the minimum lovable product, or MLP.
What is a minimum lovable product (MLP)?
You may have heard of a minimum viable product (MVP). Where a minimum viable product is a bare-bones, meets your needs solution; the minimum lovable product can be described as the simplest solution that meets your needs and is a positive step toward achieving your goals. It’s easy to view every aspect, every deliverable, as being fundamental to a project’s success. But when you actually look at each nut and bolt with a more discerning eye, you begin to realize that each component is not fundamental to the overall product’s success.
So basically the MLP is the sufficient amount of features your site needs to be satisfactory to your business goals for launch.
It’s important to note that an MLP is not necessarily a reduction in scope. It’s more a prioritization in the order for which things are addressed. The project team can circle back on anything that wasn’t part of the MLP. The goal behind an MLP is to deliver a functional product that you’re excited about, within the confines of the project.
When should you consider a minimum lovable product?
An MLP isn’t for every project, but is usually best leveraged when there is a restraint of some sort. I used timeline as an example in my opening, but as you know restraints can take many forms:
- Timeline: Maybe the deadline you need to hit, simply won’t provide enough time to complete all the work you have queued.
- Resource Availability: Perhaps there are scheduling conflicts, or limited resource availability during your project.
- Budget Constraints: Another possibility is that the budget just isn’t sufficient to get to everything you have on your list.
Regardless of the restraint you’re facing, an MLP can help you realign priorities, and expectations to compensate. But how do you go about evaluating your project for an MLP?
Need help with defining your MLP? Contact us.
How do you create a minimum lovable product?
When you’re able to parse the individual elements that are crucial to your website’s success into user stories and features, you’ll have effectively identified your project. But how do you actually go about separating the core building blocks that will comprise your MLP from the bells and whistles? It all starts with goals.
Goals
Chances are that you already have a set of goals describing what you’re hoping to achieve with the project. These ideally should be as specific as possible (ie. increase traffic) and ideally measurable (analytics). Without realistic, concrete goals you set the project up for failure. For example if your goal is to make people happy; chances are you’re going to have a hard time measuring whether you were successful. Establishing measurable goals will set the project up for success.
It’s not enough to know your goals, you have to be able to prioritize them. It’s simply not realistic that every goal be top priority. Try to narrow your priorities down to no more than three goals. Goals in hand where do we go from here in our quest to define an MLP?
Definition
Begin by thinking of all the factors that are needed for a User to accomplish a given goal. These could include anything from Layouts, to Features, to Content. Start a list of these factors:
- What are the things a User sees?
- What copy does a User read?
- What actions is a User taking while they navigate through the site?
Everything you write down while asking these questions should be in the interest of one of your priority goals. If an item isn’t directly contributing to accomplishing the goal, then it should not be on the list. If you’re not a subject matter expert that will be directly contributing to the work, you should connect with your team to determine the specific work that needs to be carried out for each of the items you’ve identified. Additional refinement, and further simplification may be needed to compensate for the restraint you’re up against.
By this point, you’ve probably realized that defining the MLP is a difficult task. The choices will be tough, and ultimately everyone is not going to get their way. What’s important is that the work you do strives to meet the goals you’ve set. This sometimes means detaching personal wants from the needs of the company. If you can tie the work back to this core philosophy, you’ll always have a strong direction for your product.
Time to get to work!
All done? Congratulations! You’ve now defined your MLP. Now you’re off to the races. Best of luck on the journey of building out your minimum lovable product.
Need help defining your MLP? Contact us. We’re happy to help.
