What is a Minimum Delightful Product?
The concept of a minimum viable product (MVP) has gained significant traction over the last decade. Practically every product professional is familiar with it and even people who don’t fully understand it use it.
But there is a lot of debate on whether teams should continue to build MVPs. In some organizations, top stakeholders have gone as far as to blockade teams from making the “crappy” minimal versions.For this and many other reasons, the conversation is shifting to creating a minimum delightful product (MDP). What is that? Why and how do we create one?
A Product that Delights
The release of The Lean Startup by Eric Ries several years ago led to a surge in the popularity of MVPs. Many people in both small and large organizations (including executives) soon adopted the term and started using it, sometimes out of context. But is it always the right approach?
As we’ve worked with the idea of MVP for over a decade now, the startup community has had the chance to digest the finer points and consider the exceptions and nuances where it may not always be the perfect approach. Thus calls for minimum delightful product (MDP) by some, such as Jar co-founder Misbah Ashraf. This is a similar concept to what Brian DeHoff suggested with the Minimum Lovable Product (MLP).
The idea is that we should be more focused on building a product that wows the customer, not just a functional one. It is argued that many companies go under for not being able to do this. This means that we shouldn’t let viability be the only thing we’re concerned about but also delight.
Why Should We Build a Minimum Delightful Product?
Like any maxim or ideology- it is only right about half the time; and the key to success is knowing which half. A Minimum Viable Product is a brilliant idea for testing novel products that solve new problems or that solve existing products in new ways. But what if you’re in an existing field and already have customers? The challenge in this case is different and so should be your response. What hypothesis are you seeking to answer in this case?
The purpose of an MVP is do the minimum necessary to achieve the learnings necessary for Product/Market fit. So dogmatically launching an MVP into an existing market, when (a) the competitors already validated market fit and (b) your product is clearly inferior to the existing (and better-known) alternatives, isn’t going to do much to validate product-market fit in that case.
In such a case, what’s “viable” is a higher bar since decent products already exist. The question you seek to answer here, is whether you can solve the problem better than your competitor now – not whether the market wants that type of product. And so you must have a delightful experience in such a case – and this is where an MDP (or MLP) makes sense.
How to Build a Product that Delights
So we’ve talked about all we could gain from building a minimum delightful product. But a question in need of an answer might be, “how?” We briefly discuss below a few key tips that could help us build a minimum version that still wows.
Interact with customers
This is certainly a bedrock of winning products. Why? We cannot create a great product completely independent of those that are going to use them.
We must identify our target audience and then proceed to understand their major pain points. We cannot assume that we already know. Understanding our potential customers and their pressing needs helps us to decide the best solution to build, what we need to prioritize.
Have a unique value proposition
Despite already having competitors, figure out some what to still differentiate yourself within that already defined niche. Afterall, what’s there to delight customers if all we’re offering is what they could easily get elsewhere? A product that delights is usually one that either offers a special value to the user or just delivers on its purpose very well (ex good design, easier to use, etc). Even if we’re not doing something entirely new, we can seek to do it in a way it’s not currently being done.
Start getting customers early
We may not need to wait until the product is ready to launch before we start getting the first customers. As Ashraf suggests, we can start building our audience (the first 100 customers) once we are convinced we have something they want. We should build a relationship with them for us to have engaged people that can help us spread the word after launch.
Gather feedback
We need candid feedback to enable us to get our minimum delightable product right. This is one of the benefits that early audience-building may afford us. The early customers that we have built a relationship with can be useful for knowing if we are going somewhat off-track.
Conclusion
MVPs and MDPs both make sense and have their right time and place. The trick is knowing which question to ask, and which tool will best help to answer that question. At the end of the day, the goal is the same, which is to maximize our efficiency of applying our limited resources to solving for product/market fit.
