 Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining and participating in this webinar today. My name is Umman Sabuhi, and I'm going to talk about minimum viable product and see how we can make it work for the whole team. For those who don't know me, I've been in payments, banking, and financing industry for more than 10 years. I had the opportunity to work in different regions with different cultures, and I have worked on a wide range of products. I've been in different levels, and I have learned a lot from them. Yes, I had successful. I have failed products, which all of them are good memories or good lessons. I'm going to share my thoughts here. For those who are interested to know more about me, you can reach out to me, or you can visit my LinkedIn profile. It's all there. You can look at it. Well, not all the products and ideas are distant for business success, no matter how compelling they seem. To me and you, what can we do to read out the ones that are not likely to succeed from the ones that are probably going to be successful? How can we accomplish this without spending a ton of money, time, and effort? One way of doing it is to create a minimum viable product or an MVP. Let's talk about it. What is an MVP? I would say MVP is that version of a product, which lets the team collect the maximum amount of learning about customers with the least amount of effort. That's what I call MVP. To realize what works and what doesn't work, you need to test the validity of your idea. And you need to gain feedback as quickly, cheaply, and efficiently as possible. After having this, you can adopt your idea based on the feedback you receive from customer before taking any major step forward. Well, it's a bit different from the conventional approach. Investing time and money to produce a complete product before discovering whether the customers want or are going to use it or not. MVP gives us that opportunity to test whether the customers are going to use this product the way that we are building it. Over the time, the definition of MVP has shifted to the smallest thing that you can build to make it to the loop of build, measure, and learn. That's a good definition for that as well. That makes sense to me at least. Well, for those who are saying the MVP is the most valuable player at the beginning of the session, my answer is yes. It's the most valuable player in a different context. Of course, we are now talking about basketball, football, or any sport game. Yes, MVP is the most valuable player. Well, how can MVP affect the bottom line? How is an MVP critical to the bottom line? Well, an MVP needs to function as the actual test of the validity of your idea. It's not just the cheap version of your product. In fact, MVP can bring value only if you use it to test the hypothesis about your offer and clear up all the uncertainties around your business plan. That's how MVP is going to bring value. In other words, you cannot just release an MVP. You need to gain data in the process. Well, we will talk about how that data is going to affect the bottom line. That's what we are going to talk about. You can see these bullet points in my screen, but we are going to explain each of those. OK, let's look at the first one. Solving real problems. Your idea may start off as an answer to a specific question, but your MVP might reveal new demands and related features that come up in the testing process. Well, so the MVP helps bring to light the issues that you might not have considered otherwise. That makes sense, right? So customers testing your MVP, they realize that, OK, the feature is very nice, actually. But while you are explaining it as an answer or as an idea, it might not help them that much. But while they're testing it, they may have new demands. They may change their demands. They may realize, OK, something is needed, something is not, or they may change the priorities. That's how this data is going to help us. Let's look at the second item. Helping you identify your real customer base. Some of you may not like this item saying that, hey, I know who is my customer. I know who is my end user. But you will be surprised if you look at the MVPs that created the new user base for the project or product team. Well, for a product to be successful, you need to know who would use the product, how they benefit from doing so. That's the most important thing you need to know about your product. The MVP provides the firsthand experiences with customers and helps clarify who your buyers are or will be. Sometimes it's interesting. There will be some people as your end users, which at the beginning, you didn't think of them as an end user. Well, item number three, which is this data is helping us by saving time and increasing productivity. But how MVP is helping us with like that? The MVP approach allows early-stage product testing for better planning or effective iterations. That's all of us know that. But this will lead to better productivity that in turn affects the bottom line. It also results on necessary features to be called before the production begins, which is going to save time, effort, and money, of course. So having early-stage tests is going to give us the early-stage feedbacks. We will make sure that the idea that we are bringing in is right, is valid, and all the features that we are working on, we will learn which one is necessary, which one is unnecessary, which one we need to put more priority time on that, and which one we will not. So this way, MVP is helping us, and it's making us more productive, and it's saving us time, money, and effort, of course. Well, how MVP is helping us to build a winning strategy? Look at it this way. MVP is not a complete product, of course. So we are expecting it to gain complexity over the time. But here's the thing. You add more features to your product, you need more resources. Now let's look at it from investor or stakeholder perspective. What is important to them is that to have a product that will do well in the market. So this is where using an MVP to demonstrate value helps to build the right strategy, the winning strategy. Now we have the opportunity to demonstrate the value to our investors, to our stakeholders. We can get resources, we can bring it up to speed, and we can have a product that is doing well in the market over the time. So think of it. It's a very important point again. I mean, all of them are important, of course. That's why we are bringing them here. But each one is a different angle of it. And this is from a strategy perspective. So MVP is helping us a lot here. And the last, but not the least, MVP is giving us reliable data. Well, it is helping us to do initial product testings. So we are not building the whole product then tested. So we are bringing, I mean, the MVP development process allows for initial product testing and feedback without having the full product. It will give us insights. Having insights is helping us to move forward in the right way so we can add features that are needed. We can eliminate the features that are not needed or no one is going to use them. So it is helping us and it is helping the product team and even the marketing team to have a better outcome. That's how it affects the bottom line. So reliable data here is, as I mentioned, giving us insight for the product and giving the idea to the marketing team to sell the product in the right way to the right people, like they know who the audiences are going to be. All right, these documents or pictures you are seeing on the screen, I'm pretty sure you have seen them in blogs, in documents, in books. But why we are saying not like this, and why we're saying like this. Let's go with one of these examples. Let's go with the car example. Let's focus on the first row. First version, what we are delivering is a wheel. The second version is two wheels. The third version is a car with the body not having the windshields. And the fourth version is a complete car. Well, looking at the customer happy with the version four is a very, very, very idealistic picture of it. Because while you are bringing those versions, customer might have been gone. I mean, not receiving the latest version or the final product that we are delivering. But why we are saying it's wrong? The first reason is the products that we are delivering in at least version one or two, they are not usable. They don't work for the customer, at least for the purpose the customer wants them to work. So we are talking about normal use cases. You might come up with a use case saying that a wheel works for me, but we are talking about normal use cases, of course. Let's go with the second row. The first version we are delivering is a skateboard. And considering the customer's needs to move from point A to point B, skateboard is going to do that for us. It's gonna solve that problem. But yes, it's not a full product, full featured product, or it's not complete. It has a lot of things that has to be done. Well, customer says it's not stable enough. That's a learning for us. So next version we will have a handle for that. Then we will come up with a bike. Customer goes from A to B, but he or she is not happy because a lot of effort is needed, actually. And from version three to four, we realize, okay, there should be an engine for that. So we put an engine there. Now we have a motorcycle. One thing I wanna call out here is that it's not necessarily we go to the version five. Sometimes during these learnings, other than us learning what are the points, pain points and important features, customer also learns a lot of things. Customer will realize, okay, motorcycle has a lot of this excitement. I can feel the fresh air. A lot of good things about the motorcycle over the car. So he or she might say, okay, that's it. That's what I want. No need to go with the next version. That might be our final version. Again, we are learning, all the stakeholders are learning. So that's what MVP brings to us. Let's go with the other example. Building a boat, sailing boat. The first version cannot be wood only. We cannot just put the woods there saying, calling customers saying that, hey, this is the first version, but that product is not working, right? So don't forget the most important thing and the first thing we should know is that whatever we deliver should work. Yes, it doesn't have to be complete, but it should work. So the raft may work for the customer. When you can see the versions, same story as I explained for the car use case, we will have with the boat. Again, customer was thinking of a sailing boat. Now he or she realizes that if I have an engine on my boat, it's gonna be much more fun, much more faster. So these are the learnings that MVP is bringing in. This approach helps everyone to learn and adjust the needs and requirements and whatever demands may come up while we are testing our versions. Three things not to forget. The products that we are delivering any version of it should work. If it's not working, it's not a product. It's not an MVP. It doesn't have to be a full feature product. And if it's a complete one, we don't call it an MVP anymore. So your MVP is not a completed product. It's a product that we are going to complete. It's the first version, second version, I mean, initial version. That's what we call MVP. And your MVP should solve the main problem. Here, the main problem is to move from point A to point B in both use cases. If that product is not doing that, so I would say you should reconsider the way that you're bringing in your MVP. I don't think that's gonna work if you're not solving the main problem. Again, some issues are there. You can fix them while you are building your product in a complete way. The complexities are coming in, but the main problem should be solved at least, okay? Metrics, important topic. So I'm gonna talk about how to set MVP metrics. Let's talk about this. The MVP should provide the smallest value for testing your hypothesis and learning about the idea. Unfortunately in some companies, you will see that the MVP becomes the most valuable product instead of being the minimum viable product. Well, how can you determine what the MVP should do for your business? How can you determine that? So how you are managing the features that are safe for version 10, version 15, not for the MVP. How do you keep from building one? There are some guidance around that. So there are two major things that you need to take care of. First one is that to answer the right questions, but you also need to develop the actionable metrics. What does it mean when we say answer the right questions? Well, the process of creating and testing the MVP should consider your central hypothesis, the pain point, the unmet need of your target customer. You must have a clear idea of the untested assumptions that once met, they will resolve the pain point. So, and they are going to eliminate the risk of going forward with that idea. The test that you're building and designing to test the hypothesis therefore should be simple and straightforward because you are going to use them to answer the central question, the main question in interaction with your target customer. So don't forget that. So you are going to build your MVP around the main question, the main problem that your product is going to solve. So that's why when we are talking about MVP, one of the most important things to put as a metric is that, did we answer the right question? Okay, so developing actionable metrics. Let's talk about that right now. Once you're clear about the question that your MVP is going to answer, you should ensure that whatever you are measuring is that relevant to how you're proceeding with the idea. That's important. So actionable metrics should guide your decision making as an entrepreneur. So they are what you need to validate your idea. For example, like social media follows, might be a vanity metric for a restaurant, but of course it's an actionable metric for the clothing brand. Metrics around customer satisfaction, daily operating profit on the other hand would be crucial for a restaurant. In other words, the metrics you use will depend on the nature of the product that you are building. So they might be common like number of signups, conversion rates, time spent using the product. These are common metrics, but you might also want to track metrics that are unrelated to the product directly at least. Like the example for that can be like level of interest in certain activities. However, you need to come up with a metric that makes sense considering the nature of the product. So you know what your MVP is going to do, what question your MVP is answering. Now you need to measure it in a way that is relevant to how you want to proceed with the idea. So for a product to be viable, you need ways to measure its success or failure. The measurement need to be factored into the product from the beginning, from the definition phase. So these factors, these measures should be there from day one while you are designing the product, you are defining the product. It's very important to consider that. I thought you might be interested knowing like what type of metrics startups are using these things. So I mean, I'm listing, there are thousands of them. So I put like five, six of them here. I'm gonna give a very brief overview over them to tell you how they are using them. But these are just an example of what they're using. So depending on the product, as I mentioned, it might be different or they might use different metrics. So churn rate is the percentage of the customers who have disconnected their subscription. So that's an important thing for startup because I mean, they are dependent on the customers, they are having, the user base they are creating. It's very important for them to grow. Customer acquisition costs. So this is the average cost of acquiring a new customer. So the business model they have, how does it work? Is it very costly to bring in a new customer comparing to the competitors or the companies that are doing the same thing? So it's also a metric to measure. Monthly recurring revenue, I mean, you all know what it is and lifetime value of a customer is like the revenue that they are basically or the profit that they're predicted they will have while customer is using their products. The average revenue per user or these type of metrics, these are all important things for startups. But for different companies, different businesses they might have different and other metrics to be measured. So these are just examples of that. Well, how to measure MVP success? As we discussed many things before in this session. So your MVP success lies in uncovering the long-term potential of your product. It should tell everyone what this product can be used for. What this product is adding as a value. It should tell them that's one of the things that your MVP should do. That's how we measure its success. And the second thing of course is developing in a strategy to unlock that potential because we are telling them it's gonna do that but it should do that in the future. So don't forget that whatever we deliver should work. Whatever we are saying it's gonna deliver we should deliver. So it should uncover the long-term potential and it should help us to unlock those potentials. So that's how we measure the success of an MVP. To do both you need metrics to capture qualitative feedback. And basically what I'm trying to say is you need metrics that captures qualitative feedback from future prospects of your product. That's what I meant. Metrics are often thought of as being quantitative means that there should be numeric. I mean, it should be quantitative. So what I'm trying to say here is that gaining qualitative insights doesn't mean that you should not also be a data driven. You need both of them. So it's not only quantitative or qualitative. Sorry, I mean it seems that I'm pronouncing incorrectly. So once you have the MVP gaining an understanding of the customer sentiment is just as important as looking at the metrics. That's also other thing that is gonna help us to do both of these things that we are saying that are crucial for an MVP success. So we need that. In other words, engagement matters. So it is measured according to the context of the product and market, but it's a good way to understand how customers are seeing current value or the future value of our MVP. So that's also we need to take care of that. Feature flow analysis. Probably the product MVP that we are bringing in will have more than one feature, but it's important for us to monitor which features customers are using the most in which sequence they're using them, how they are using them. It will, this analysis is gonna give us great insights. It will help us to make our MVP successful. And another way to discover whether your MVP resonates with the target customers is to quantify words of math traffic. Yes, the net promoter score is a good metric but can cause problems, especially when it's a small user base. So for many MVP's interviews with the customers will yield better data for us. I was not planning to bring in, this is like, I mean, but it's interesting to talk about two stories that I had as an experience in my career. So I was, I mean, in my career, I've been working on two core banking projects for two banks. Let's say bank A and bank B. Of course, I cannot disclose the information of the banks that I've been working on. But they might seem very similar, but they are not. One of them didn't have a centralized system and they were using, I mean, old systems or platforms, each branch had their own. The way they were communicating a few years back were like something that we have seen in the stories only. I mean, in today's world, it's not, even one bank is not there that is working like that. The other bank, they did have a core banking system. They had issues with the vendor and the team who were operating the platform, the core banking they have. So what I'm trying to say here, this example might be off the way from what I was explaining so far, but it's a very important thing for you to consider. When we say the metrics, the tests, the designs, the MVP depends on the nature of the product that you are building. It's not only the product, it's the stakeholder as well. So if you're building a car for somebody who has already have a car, your MVP is gonna be different from the one person who is buying a car from you and not having anything to go from A to B because you should get the engagement of the user. So the state, the current state of the user, the culture of the user, the knowledge of the user and the motivation as well. I mean, of course you have to manage them, you have to bring them up to speed, but these are also important things that we need to take care of while we are talking to our stakeholders, while we are designing our MVP, while we are bringing the first version or a skateboard, bus ticket, raft, whatever your first version is. So you need to take care of many things regarding the stakeholder. The current state matters. So you need to look into the current state. You cannot start with something that is not a promising key for your end user. I'm going to the next slide. Well, about delivering value. So following the definition of MVP, you can focus on delivering customer value and reading out the unnecessary features. However, balancing product priorities does not end after you're launching your MVP. So you need to do that even if you have a very well-established product, having a lot of customers, it's going to be there and it's going to be a necessary part of your product life cycle. Your first order of business with MVP should be to determine what features you are going to put priority on, what features you are going to build first and what can wait until later. These are the things that you need to keep in your mind while thinking of MVP and in general about your product life cycle. Setting priorities brings value for your customer. Well, I'm going to do a conclusion here. So first of all, deliver the MVP as the first version, work on it, learn on it, measure it and again, build the next version. Gain feedbacks because those feedbacks are going to give you insight. As we talked about many things and many values they are bringing, they will help you to have a better strategy, better design and a better product at the end and focus on values and which customers are looking at. So your stakeholders, your customers, those are the people who are going to use your product. So you need to pay attention. You need to focus on the values they are looking for. And of course you can add to them but the core thing is to bring the value they are expecting. And of course the resources are limited. You don't have all the world working for you. So you need to set the priorities, what can be done now, what can wait till later and these weeding out the unnecessary features and stuff like that is a very crucial part of the product management while you are doing it in agile environment and especially when you are doing it in MVP. Well, at the end, these are my learnings during my career working in agile environment. First of all, avoid big bank deliveries especially when we are talking about complex innovative product developments. Do it iteratively, do it incrementally. I'm sure that you know it already but just look back, see, did you do that? Are you doing it right now? So if not, just reconsider it because big bank deliveries, they do have a lot of problems. You don't have the feedbacks and sometimes the customer is not going to use your product. Then it's not gonna be a happy day for your team and for the customer as well. Well, I would say start by identifying your MVP. Identifying your MVP means that what you are solving. Ask the right questions, answer those questions. What is the main problem you are fixing? So the earliest testable, likable product whatever you wanna call it doesn't have to be called MVP. You can say first lovable product, first testable product. Let's define it at the beginning. So aim for the clouds as I mentioned here but swallow your product, start delivering the skateboard the raft, the bus ticket at the beginning. So that's something that you need to learn. And either way you learn it here, you learn it at school or you learn it by experience. The experienced one is the most expensive one to learn. So it's better to use the others experience as well. So determine MVP. I know sometimes when you say MVP no one wants to listen to you anymore because they have seen some use cases. Sometimes because of some issues happened in the before there is no trust. Be more explicit. Tell them what exactly you are talking about. Tell them this is the earliest thing that I can bring in you can test and you can give me feedback. It will help me to understand better. It will tell me if I'm on the same page with you or not to your customer. So you don't have to call it MVP and I would say avoid call it MVP. So call it whatever makes sense for your customer for your stakeholder, whatever is easy for them to understand what you are talking about. And never forget that. Your focus should be on customer values and priorities because if you don't focus on that you are not gonna have a customer who's happy and who's going to use your product. Hopefully these items that we discussed today are going to be useful for you and there was something for you to learn here. Thank you so much guys for joining today again and I hope to see you soon in the future. If there are any questions if you have any ambiguities if there is something that you think I can help you with you can reach out to me by email or my LinkedIn profile. Have a good one everyone.