How to identify the minimum viable features (MVF) for your product

In today’s highly competitive software development world, the difference between success and failure often hinges on your ability to identify the right features to prioritize. You need to be able to strike a balance between delivering value and avoiding feature bloat.

Determining your minimum viable features (MVF) helps you achieve this by aligning your product development with customer needs. Keep reading to learn more about the MVF process, how they differ from a minimum viable product (MVP), and how you can implement them within your team.

What are minimum viable features?

Minimum viable features (MVF) refer to the set of features necessary to deliver a product that meets the primary needs of your customers, while still providing enough value to be marketable. These deliver maximum value with minimal resources.

Some key characteristics of MVF include:

• User-centricity — Your features should aim to provide an intuitive and seamless experience, ensuring customer satisfaction from the outset. This should also align with your business and revenue goals
• Clear value proposition — Well-defined features help clearly communicate your product’s unique value and benefits to your target customer base, creating strong market positioning against your competitors
• Resource efficiency — Focusing on your absolutely necessary features helps optimize the use of your resources, reducing development costs and minimizing waste
• Quick time-to-market — By limiting the scope to vital features, MVF enables faster development cycles. This lets you stake a claim in the market sooner, which can be very important in the highly competitive software industry
• Flexibility and scalability — With MVF, your product has the flexibility to adapt and evolve based on market trends and customer feedback, without extensive rehauling of your current product infrastructureIdentifying the minimum viable features

Methods for establishing MVF

Identifying your minimum viable features requires a structured approach that combines user research, market and competitive analysis, prioritization techniques, and collaboration among stakeholders. Try use these common methods:

User research and story mapping

You can conduct user research to understand the problems, needs, and behaviors of your target audience. This could include surveys, interviews, focus groups, and observational studies. Once you gather these insights, create a visual map of your customer’s journey to gain the most value from your product, identify the key steps/features of that journey, and assess what’s absolutely critical to deliver that user experience.

For example, think of an e-commerce website where you provide value to a customer through an easy purchasing process. The MVF could include browsing products, adding items to the cart, checking out, and processing a payment. Other features like advanced filtering, wish lists, and recommendations can be added later.

Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) framework

The JTBD framework helps you understand specific “jobs” how customers try to accomplish them with your product. This approach helps identify the core features you need to complete those “jobs” effectively and quickly.

For example, if you’re developing an online learning platform, the JTBD might include things like “help me learn a new skill,” or “provide practice exercises” as jobs. The MVF would then align with these jobs and include features like bite-sized lessons, quizzes, and progress tracking.

MoSCoW prioritization tool

When identifying your list of MVF, you need ways to prioritize them. To help with this, you can use the MoSCoW method:

• Must haves — Features that must be present in your product
• Should haves — Features that are important, but not vital
• Could haves — Features that would be nice to have in the product
• Won’t haves — Features that are not really needed

For example, take a mobile banking app. The must haves would include viewing your account balance and making money transfers. A should have would be bill payments, while a could have would be a personalized budgeting tool. A won’t have feature might be peer-to-peer payments that can be deprioritized for later.

Value vs. effort matrix

This matrix can help you prioritize features based on their potential value to customers assessed against the effort required to deliver that value. While one axis plots the value provided to your target audience, the other plots the effort required to build and implement the features.

Analyzing the quadrants plotted by the axes, the high value, low effort features are prioritized as the MVF list.

For example, in a SaaS productivity platform, a “Quick Add Task” feature might be identified as high value and low effort, making it a prime candidate for MVF. On the other hand, an integration with a third-party app might be high value, but also high effort, which should then be slated for a future release.

Lean canvas tool

A lean canvas is a tool for mapping out the key aspects of your product, including the primary customer problem, the solution to address that problem, target customer segments, and a unique value proposition. You can create digital templates to implement this tool and get your team members to collaboratively fill them out and analyze the MVF list.

Consider a health and fitness app. A lean canvas would highlight that users struggle with maintaining daily habits. Based on this information, the MVF list could include habit tracking, notifications, and motivational content as the main features to address this problem.

MVF vs. MVP

While product managers tend to gravitate towards a MVP, sales teams tend to be more inclined towards MVF. Why? MVF tend to present better revenue opportunities.

A MVP is the most basic version of a product. Sometimes this can make the product difficult to sell. Oftentimes, PMs include MVF in the iterative development process after determining the MVP. To help you understand the differences between the two, consult the following table below:

Best practices for implementing MVF

Successfully implementing MVF involves a strategic and balanced approach of user research, feature prioritization, and cross-functional collaboration. By following industry best practices, you can ensure that you deliver a product that meets core customer needs, aligns with business goals, and lays a strong foundation for future growth.

Here are some best practices you can incorporate:

• Invest the time to deeply understand your customers — their needs, pain points, preferences, expectations, behaviors, etc.
• Always prioritize features that add the maximum value to your customers with minimal use of resources, especially those that they are willing to pay for
• Your selected MVF should always align with your business strategy and goals, including product roadmap, revenue generation, and brand positioning
• Iterate on your MVF based on real-world usage and customer feedback, pivot when necessary, and notify all relevant stakeholders
• Keep the scope manageable by avoiding scope creep and setting clear boundaries. Your team’s focus should not deviate from the MVF
• Leverage prototyping and user testing to identify potential issues and address them before releasing your MVF
• Define and establish key success criteria for your MVF to continuously measure and analyze the results

Real-world examples of minimum viable features

To show how MVF apply in a real business setting, review these examples of how companies have implemented then to drive product results:

Spotify

When Spotify was first launched in 2008, the music streaming market was already crowded with big players like iTunes, YouTube, and Pandora. The company needed to differentiate itself while ensuring quick time-to-market.

Spotify’s MVF strategy was focused on providing a seamless music streaming experience with a few critical features — the ability to stream music instantly with minimum buffering, a robust search function that enabled users to find any track, album, or artist, and the ability to create and share playlists. Spotify was able to grow quickly with millions of active users. It later introduced other advanced features that helped further its community of music lovers.

Slack

The company was created to address the primary user problem of fragmented communication. It developed a centralized platform for messaging and collaboration, improving team communication and boosting productivity.

Slack’s MVF strategy was focused on a simple, organized way for teams to communicate in channels based on projects or departments, the ability to search through past conversations easily, and the option to share files directly within conversations, reducing the need for external tools. The simplicity of the platform attracted users and helped it to grow globally, quickly. Additional integrations and automations were added later.

Conclusion

Understanding and implementing MVF is crucial for building products that resonate with users, while optimizing resources. By focusing on the essential features that address core customer needs, you can deliver value quickly, gather meaningful feedback, and iterate effectively.

A well-executed MVF strategy can be a significant driver of product success, enabling you to scale and enhance your product offerings over time. Here are the three key takeaways:

• MVF refer to the essential set of product features required to deliver immediate value to users. These should also be aligned with your overall business strategy and goals
• Focusing on MVF ensures that development efforts are efficient and aligned with customers’ needs, helping to avoid feature bloat and unnecessary complexity
• Implementing MVF effectively involves thorough user research, prioritization of features based on value, cross-functional collaboration, and continuous iteration based on customer feedback

Featured image source: IconScout