Taking prototype into production

Your MVP, or your basic, essentials-only product, is ready for launch. So what’s next?

Once you launch your MVP, the ultimate goal is to take the data collected from your MVP and launch a fully developed product/system.

For your MVP to be successful for launch, be sure to follow these steps.

Measures and steps you should complete to bring your MVP to market

• Have you shown customer usage and engagement?

Analyzing your customer’s usage and engagement with your MVP will help you develop key messages for marketing, future product features, and determine whether your MVP is solving your customer’s pain points. Understanding your customer’s engagement will be critical for your product’s next development stage.

• Are you tracking analytics?

Be sure you’re tracking the right things and in enough detail to gain valuable insight from your data. By having a strategic tracking plan in place, the data that you are collecting should determine whether you’re reaching your goals and proving your hypothesis.

• Are you following up with your customers and the people who are using your product with a survey?

The best information and feedback will be given right by your customer. Consider incentivizing your customers for completing a survey with a gift card or discount on your service as a thank you. Promised incentives have shown increased response rates. Everyone loves their coffee paid for one morning, right?

• Are you running focus groups?

Focus groups are useful to obtain detailed information about personal and group feelings, perceptions, and opinions. The outcomes of a focus group could give you valuable insight and provide real-life suggestions/examples. The group can also address certain pain points not addressed in your MVP. We believe this is so crucial that during the Deployment and Learning stage of the 3-2-1 Launch we facilitate interviews and focus groups for our clients.

• Are you keeping the momentum going internally?

Operations, Finance, Engineering, Product Management, and Executives all need to be fully involved and invested, otherwise, you risk stalling on the project. Keep the whole team engaged and motivated by having weekly status meetings.

We like to follow the EOS method to keep our meetings effective and on track.

• What are you doing about visualizations? Are you applying data science techniques?

Similar to tracking analytics, it’s important to understand your data. For the best MVP results, analyze and collect only the necessary data, or risk mumbling up your data. Bring your data visualizations to your weekly standup meetings to easily convey findings to your team.

After Craftsman launched their fully developed product, Lab651 created a dashboard for Craftsman at Sears to give them visibility into their data.

• Can you push code or software remotely to the deployed systems?

We believe it’s critical for your product to always be up to date with new software and developments you make along the way. Be sure you have the capability of updating your products remotely so you don’t waste time and energy driving onsite for product updates.

The Lab651 team has the skills and expertise to ensure this function exists in your product.

• Have you calculated ROI?

This ties into the following bullet point on technical feasibility. For this product and MVP to make sense, you should have proven ROI and product needs from your customers. ROI= Market Need / Efforts Invested

• Have you thought about technical feasibility for the next phase?
  

Continually assessing both the business use case and technical feasibility are important perimeters in deciding what features to build in the next phase. We can help you define a matrix that quantifies your business value and use case and make an informed decision for your next phase.

 

 

If you have a prototype out in the field and you want a successful product launch, engage in our 3-2-1 Launch Process.

By the way, It’s never too late for a workshop.

Contact us at connect@lab651.com.