Minimum valuable product, or how to effectively develop a product

On June 2, 2022, the Warsaw edition of Code Europe – the largest programming conference in Poland – took place at the National Stadium. One of the speakers of the event was Bartosz Bednarek from the Application Development Department of Bank Millennium. The topic of our expert's speech was the concept of a minimum valuable product as the optimum method of implementing the software development process.

"The events of recent years have shown the need for a flexible approach to long-term planning. The answer to the dynamically changing environment is the concept of a Minimum Valuable Product (MVP), which shows that long-term strategies are easier to implement with the help of short-term goals, enabling adaptation to dynamic changes in the environment and facilitating the achievement of key sales goals such as monetization – said Bart Bednarek from Bank Millennium during the Warsaw edition of Code Europe – the largest conference for IT specialists in Poland.

Bank Millennium’s Application Development Department representative pointed out why it is worth approaching software development in a comprehensive way. - Too much focus on writing more and more lines of code often breeds the phenomenon referred to as the "Big Bang" – striving to include as many solutions as possible at the initial stage of the project. This leads to a situation in which we have spent a lot of time and resources on creating a product that ultimately does not meet the client's needs. Let's not forget that our task is primarily to create in a relatively short time such software that will meet the needs of our client and will give the opportunity for further development – he said.

During his lecture, our expert explained the importance of event storming and user story mapping methods for development teams, these being useful tools in the process of creating MVP. - Event Storming consists in identifying events important for a given program that are its components and transferring them to the processes taking place as part of the system being built. Take, for example, a user's entering the home page of an online store. What should our program do in this situation? Show an ad? Or maybe propose an additional product? By marking subsequent stages of the process, we build a business path of product implementation. At the same time, thanks to the involvement of technical experts in Event Storming, we can determine the system processes taking place in the background and identify potential threats. This way we obtain a draft of the system, the path of process implementation, we identity potential threats, but above all we get a written list of minimum functionalities necessary to start the first monetization. In turn, User Story Mapping, in which we identify activities that the user performs as part of, for example, the process of purchasing goods via the Internet, allows us to determine the priorities for our project and plan its valuation – said Bartosz Bednarek.

The representative of Bank Millennium also emphasized the importance of the "Happy Path" in the process of creating the MVP version of the product. - Happy Path is a set of functionalities crucial from the point of view of various ways of using software as a product, e.g. from the perspective of the customer, seller and owner. The most important is, of course, the first of them, because it is thanks to the customer that the entrepreneur can post profits. The use of this approach means that the software developer and product testers can after a relatively brief time (a week or two) start the first interaction with the user path and identify key functionalities, e.g. based on the number of clicks made by the user before completing a transaction. The great advantage of this method is the ability to check the real experience through the eyes of the consumer from the very beginning of the work. Moreover, further solutions can be added in the next stages, thus encasing the previously created core of the product – he said.