The Lean Canvas accommodates and highlights this uncertainty by staying high level. There is no false sense of certainty here. In the early days, there are simply things we can not know. The Lean Canvas assumes this and helps guide the user down a path of progressive discovery, thus removing uncertainty.
In our last blog post, we covered No-Code and Low-Code, what these terms mean, and, most importantly how best to use these tools and techniques to help you get a software product to market.
A Minimum Viable Product is the nexus of these two ideas: narrow scope with a bias towards learning. It is a tool to help you build out an idea, test it in the market, and learn from its performance so you can iterate on it.
Last week we covered the different methods available for building a new software product and this week we’re going to start our journey into one of those methods, Development Shops.
There are lots of heated debates about where the line is drawn between MVPs and Prototypes, but we want to make this simple for you to understand by creating a simple heuristic:
If it creates value and a customer will trade something of value to use it, it’s an MVP. If it doesn’t create value, it’s a Prototype.
Once we’ve got this hypothesis created, it’s time to test it! And the first way we do that is by talking to potential users.
Now, you may be asking yourself, who is my potential user? Well, chances are you already have a pretty good idea in mind, but just like our hypothesis should be specific and measurable, so should our ideal user profile be, too.
There’s a distinctly different set of tactics and methods used to develop digital products. There’s a very good reason for this!
You see, with digital products like mobile apps, websites, or web applications, there are almost always more unknowns than knowns. Unlike, say, a sneaker which we have a very well defined process and archetype for building, software just doesn’t come with a manual.
Digital Products are mobile apps, websites, web applications, and more. Essentially, if it’s made of lines of code and lives on a computing device, you’ve got a digital product on your hands.
As you can probably tell from this description, there are lots of different kinds of digital products for just as many kinds of applications and uses. But they aren’t always the right fit for some use cases.