Introduction to defining Feature set / Product-Market Fit
We are already in our 5th article of the “Product-Market Fit” series, all 4 previous articles were focusing on the problem space. We were learning the market, discovering and understanding the underserved needs of our customers, and defining our value proposition according to their needs. Today's article is the beginning of our solution space which will be about defining the solution and testing it with the customers.
In the journey towards achieving the Product-Market Fit, we have both the problem space where we focus on understanding the people, their problems, and what we can do to solve them, and then the solution space comes as the “How” to solve those problems and to test if they have been solved.
In the last article, we discussed defining the value proposition, so I assume at this point you already have an idea of what you want to offer as value to your target customers. The next important step is to translate that value, those benefits that you want to offer that you believe will cover some underserved needs of your customers. Defining features.
When you are building a new digital product, you have a big task of validating if your idea of solving problems is really of value to the people you are targeting. That requires building what we call an MVP (Minimum Viable Product). There will always be new ideas even when you have a mature product, new ideas are always tested to be considered valid, that’s why Iterating your product based on the feedback from your market is also part of defining features. Let’s start by discussing the MVP.
MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
People define the MVP in different ways but allow me to explain it to you in my way. You have ideas of how you can solve the problems your target customers have, but allow me to tell you they are just assumptions until they are proven to be true or efficient. Now Imagine you hire an engineering team, take 1 year to build something, and invest in money, only to find out that what you thought was going to work is not enough to cover your customers' needs. After spending millions and your product is not worth it. To solve that, the best way is to build an MVP.
For an MVP, all you have to do is to identify the minimum functionality required to validate that you are heading in the right direction.
To build an MVP, we choose the minimum set of features that will help us to validate if we are building the right thing before we dive deep into investing a lot of money in developing the whole solution, we just have to be sure, that’s how products achieve the Product-Market Fit. The first time that you will ship your MVP to the market, you won’t 100% get the results you thought you will have, you need to keep in mind that the market knows its problems more than you, so the MVP will also allow you to connect and understand your customers more. You might understand the problem very well, but depending on the culture, level of education, and other characteristics of your target customers, they will also play a key role in choosing their solution.
In this article, let me share with you a high-level structured way of coming up with and defining features that will help you in brainstorming with your team:
List every benefit mentioned in your product value proposition: This exercise helps the team to remember what you want to offer to your customers. This exercise will help your team to be aligned on which benefits you want to offer and the more they see those benefits on the table, the more they meditate on them.
Feature ideas per benefit: Take your time as a team, to go on every benefit listed above, and come up with different ideas of how your product can offer that specific benefit. This exercise of bringing ideas is not done in general, it is done on every benefit.
Capturing and organizing all ideas per benefit: After brainstorming, the team captures all the ideas generated and organizes them per benefit so that now you can start choosing which ideas are best, and asking questions,...
Voting & Choosing: At this step, the team discusses ideas that were generated, asks questions for clarification and they vote for the best ones per benefit. The ones that have been voted, they are the ones that are considered in the build stage.
We have different ways of gathering ideas from the team and choosing the ones to build for the MVP. The mentioned steps are not only for the MVP but also for any new idea that comes to mind and it has to be implemented. The team always has to gather in the discovery session and share ideas of how problems can be solved, and work together to choose the best ideas to be implemented and tested.
A kind reminder that this is the intro to defining features, I will elaborate on the MVP in a single article where we will deeply discuss techniques of choosing which features to be part of the MVP. Today my goal was for you to understand what the MVP is, and how we get features from the value proposition. The next article will also be an introduction to the User Experience and how the defined and implemented features can be tested and approved by the target customers. STAY TUNED.