Many talk about Minimal Viable Products (MVPs) and user driven innovation. Here’s how we did it on our latest product, the intelligent grocery watch app, Grosh, for Pebble smart watches.
Minimal Viable Product
So, how do you get started with building a product without tons of funding and huge risks? You develop an MVP of course, meaning the smallest set of features required to meet the most needed use case(s) – so you can ship something fast that delivers value. So how did we go about it? We zoomed in on the use case – the most relevant use case for our watch app is when you’re in the store shopping. So features supporting this had top priority, such as displaying the grocery list fetched from our cloud servers and marking items as purchased.
Early validation
We launched and got a download peak identical to our initial launch of our iOS and Android versions. So with simple means, we had increased our user base substantially and given a valuable product to our users! Not complete by any means, but providing value. As anticipated, suggestions started rolling in, especially on Reddit. Telling us how to improve and make the simple product great!
Improve
We collected inputs and talked with users about different solutions to their wishes. We compiled a backlog and started shipping releases to adjust the product with features and changes requested by many users.
Continuous feedback
The first update shipped a few weeks ago based on user inputs regarding colours, support for Pebble Round, ability to add an item using dictation etc. All changes based the user driven innovation process initiated by our initial MVP. And after that, we did another update this week with further refinements.
So MVPs and user driven innovation works, in case anyone was in doubt!
And if your’re a Grosh for Pebble user, keep your comments coming!
Kind regards
The Grosh Team