The power of a well-designed MVP

Wondering how to bring your product to market quickly without compromising on quality? The secret lies in creating a well-crafted MVP, or minimum viable product. When you step into the Agile and Lean UX world, MVP is a term you'll often hear. An MVP is more than just a stripped-down version of your final product; it’s a product or feature that works from start to finish but includes only what users need to complete essential tasks. For example, on a dashboard, the MVP might show just the most important KPIs (key performance indicators) for a user; features like customizing those KPIs can be added later. At Osedea, we believe that a thoughtful MVP is the key to building scalable, long-term solutions that truly meet your users’ needs.

In this article, we'll share what an MVP is (and isn't) and how we use UX design strategies to validate ideas early. Our goal is to deliver data-driven, realistic solutions with a development backlog that’s ready to go.

Understanding MVP: why we design before we develop

Typically, building an MVP means developing the key features, testing the code for bugs with a QA team, and then releasing it to end-users to gather feedback. But jumping straight into development can be costly. Without usability testing before launch, the final product can feel disconnected and frustrating for users. Once something is coded, changes become harder and more expensive, often leading to rework, redesign, and extensive testing. These adjustments can throw off timelines, stretching resources. Alterations can also introduce integration challenges and technical debt, making it crucial to align the solution with the envisioned UI right from the start.

Why our approach is different

We believe every MVP should be thoroughly researched, realistic, useful, and engaging before it reaches users. Our aim is always to create great software, and that starts by making sure every design decision is intentional and aligned with your business vision and user needs.

That’s why we start with a collaborative and iterative Discovery Process. We run workshops and maintain continuous feedback loops to ensure we’re addressing the right challenges and understanding what your MVP should look like. By focusing on essential features and gathering early feedback, we reduce the risk of wasting time on things that don’t matter.

Leveraging UX design to build scalable products

Focusing on the core features of your product is part of our iterative design and development approach. Our design expertise helps you solve the right problems, guide you towards a workable development backlog, and keeps things transparent and under control as we work together.

Prioritization: how we get you to an MVP

UX prioritization workshops are key to making decisions, comparing options, and setting priorities. These workshops bring stakeholders together, deepen our understanding of your business objectives, and help us identify key features early on. By focusing on how we can deliver value to your users while keeping things simple at the start, we can reduce our time to market and build a product that can grow and scale cost-effectively.

We use various prioritization methods depending on the stage of design. Our expertise is in choosing the right method for the project to get the answers we need to move forward. For example:

• MoSCoW Method: A prioritization technique that categorizes features into Must Have, Should Have, Could Have, and Won’t Have, great for generating lots of ideas without limiting creativity.
• Impact-Effort Matrix: A tool that helps prioritize the most valuable ideas by balancing impact against effort, ideal for tight deadlines, like preparing for a trade show.‍
• User Story Mapping: A method that visualizes the user journey, helping us understand the real costs and steps needed to turn design into a development roadmap.

In our article Mastering MVP success: 3 prioritization strategies that work, we dive deeper into how these UX prioritization workshops helped three of our clients in the healthcare industry.

These workshops work no matter where you are in the process—whether redesigning a complex product, adding a new feature, or creating something entirely new. Prioritization workshops help us make the most of our design expertise, solve complex problems, and deliver on our promises, on time.

Building for tomorrow: the power of a thoughtful MVP

At Osedea, we prioritize thorough design research and user testing to ensure every MVP is realistic, useful, and engaging before it reaches your end-users. Trying to do everything at once isn’t always the best approach, even if the ideas are great. We believe it’s essential to build toward a product that will grow over time—and we use design to ensure that we have a long-term vision for great software.

Ready to turn your big idea into a market-ready product? Let’s start by designing a smart MVP that’s tailored to your vision and user needs. Contact us today to see how our UX expertise can help you create a scalable, long-term solution that stands out.