The real MVP

Today was a very interesting day from a learning point of view. Our first lecture was Genesis and I felt that there was so much valuable information squeezed into 2 hours. We first looked at finding a problem that is currently effecting people. We then looked how important finding a good solution for the problem and finally we looked at engineering it in such a way that it meets the needs of the people effected thus solving the problem, which is what we need to do!

We also learnt that you need to truly understand the problem and more importantly understand your customer.

We learnt that we need to develop a business model canvas and from there we can use this canvas to develop a series of hypothesis. From there we need to thoroughly test this hypothesis by getting outside and speaking to our target market face to face and from there our canvas can pivot and change accordingly until it is more accurate. We also watched a couple very interesting videos by Steve Blank who is a very successful entrepreneur. He spoke about a few topics such as the following:

• the lean startup: he spoke about learning and discovering and gathering insights for moving forward. He also spoke about the pivot or changes in the business canvas and that by learning and discovering this would be possible. He also said that by getting outside and doing this we would be able to find the right product for the right customers. From this lean method we arrived at business model design, customer development and agile engineering. I learnt that by doing this one is able to gather far more accurate data and get answers that could potentially save lots of time and money in the future.

We then looked at the minimum viable product, which I found really insightful. We must not worry about our product being totally ready before we take it to market. One we have a tangible product that is 20% completed we need to go out there and start asking the right people the right questions and by doing so we would be able to see whether we are solving our problem and that our product has the right features for the right people.