Many of you will be aware of the concept of a minimum viable product, or MVP, in software development: the idea of building something as quickly as possible and launching a product which is just good enough, then capturing user feedback to iterate your way to something better.
Without a doubt, the method has been responsible for countless successes over the years, dominating the product development landscape. But just as we iterate our products, we must also refresh our approach to development in a rapidly evolving marketplace. The time has come for MVP to stand aside: long live the MLP, the minimum lovable product.
Let’s rewind a bit.
Back when the internet was a fresh new product itself, simply serving up any solution to a user problem was often more than good enough. With limited choice, consumers had to accept that even if something didn’t look or work all that great, just having access to a new tool was progress. In addition to this, many business users were locked into the clunky enterprise solution of choice, with square pegs in round holes in abundance.
But the explosion of innovative SaaS (software as a service) companies in the last few years has rightly raised expectations. Consumers often have many more options to achieve similar outcomes, and enterprise customers are no longer as tied to a corporate vendor.
In this market, simply hitting a minimum set of features to make a product viable isn’t good enough - users have been trained to expect a high level of interactivity, responsiveness and good, well thought out user experience design, even for internal tools. Products need to up their game and solve a problem in a way that makes their users love them.
We’re not reinventing the wheel here: what makes a product lovable is still related to the problem and user. It doesn’t even need to have a beautiful user interface, although that helps. But it really does need to solve the user’s problem in such a way that they want to evangelise your product, even when it’s your first version.
Trust me, a web app that turns an error-prone task that took three hours a day into a 15-minute check in where everything is done for you, will evoke love in a user. Simply helping them do something a bit better won’t cut it, there are probably 50 products already doing that, including an Excel spreadsheet.
At Enroly, we’ve always been amazed and grateful for the amount of love we get from our university partners, all the way from when we launched CAS Shield years ago, right through to the mature product that 20 percent of UK universities rely on today. We’re applying cutting-edge technology in AI and machine learning to transform offer-to-arrival processing, and we make sure that when we develop new features, they’re always MLP.
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