Key Activities

The activities for an MVS are about defining a clear near-term deliverable that encompasses everything you would need to build, operate, and support this service. This is where thinking of this through the lens of a service is a key differentiating aspect of this exercise. While the activities for defining your MVS will likely differ significantly across different domains and starting points, this section captures some of the concepts that are often included in this exercise:

Figure 4 - MVS cycle of development

Defining the Target Early Adopters for the MVS release

• Goal: Define the specific users and roles that you will target with the MVS. This may be internal and/or external users.

• Outcome: A clear list of early adopters that you expect to support with this initial release, along with any qualifiers that might narrow the scope of the experience (initially) for them.

• Key Decision Point: Can the MVS target a subset of the target users/tiers that will ultimately need to be supported by the system? Will narrowing to a smaller set of users/tiers undermine the success of your system?

Outlining the Minimum Product Functionality

• Goal: Based on the tiers/personas you will target; define the set of product functionality you will need to include for this offering.

• Outcome: Capture high-level notions of key product features that will be needed to support the scope and customer targets you have identified. This is not about being granular, it is about defining high-level concepts that you see as core to this solution.

• Key Decision Point: Have you identified a set of features that will be viable for the target users you have identified? How will these features enable you to attract and retain customers? Which capabilities may need to be included as part of making this available in a service model?

Outlining the Minimum Operational Experience

• Goal: Define the elements that will need to be put in place to successfully operate this solution.

• Outcome: A well-defined view of the operational experience that includes tooling, processes, and insights that will be needed to support this new environment. The emphasis here is on automating and streamlining the operational experience to lay the foundation for rapid innovation, agility, and market response.

• Key Decision Point: Do you have the tooling, skills, and experience needed to build a best practices operational experience? What will you do to ensure that operations and agility are prioritized within your overall culture and development process?

Target Feedback Experience

• Goal: Determine how you will engage potential customers to capture feedback on your minimum viable service.

Note

This could be in many forms and not necessarily a feature you are building (e.g. interviews, forms, real-time, or offline).

• Outcome: Selection of a strategy that defines how and if you plan to incorporate users into your MVS development lifecycle.

• Key Decision Point: Will you have customers integrated into your process during the active development? How will you expect to identify the customers that will engage in this process?

Defining Core SaaS Tenets for the MVS

• Goal: Capture and document the core tenets that will define where the SaaS bar is being set for this initial offering. This is important to ensure success at each delivery.

• Outcome: A list of the tenets that outline precisely which goals you are targeting for the business, operational, and agility attributes of this minimum viable service. The challenge here is to have your sights on general SaaS best practices while still acknowledging that you may not target the longer-term experience for this MVS. Being clear about this is essential to defining where the bar is.

• Key Decision Point: Which compromises you are making in this MVS? How those compromises will impact the success and agility of your overall SaaS story (this is about forcing your team to agree on these goals and boundaries)?