The Mobile Spoon

A minimum viable product (MVP) is often perceived as a subset of the real product: a minimized version, lacking some features or missing some UI fine-tunes, but in fact, an MVP is more of a tool to test the core idea of what’s intended to be a product someday. While the name MVP suggests that it has to be both a product and a viable thing - the software industry has proven it doesn’t have to be the case.  In fact, an MVP doesn’t have to be a product at all: it can be an email, a Facebook group, a service, or a bunch of processes performed manually. An MVP is there to help you test your business riskiest assumptions, see if your product can provide enough value to attract customers, and collect some feedback that can guide you through the product development. And last, people should be willing to pay for it (with real money or some level of commitment) - otherwise, it’s just theoretical exercise that cannot prove that the idea is...

As startups building new products, our primary goal is to move  from 0 to 1 .  In the effort to onboard our first customers, we will do whatever is necessary to engage with them, attract them, and turn them into  hard-activated users .  As your product starts to see its first wave of users, it's important to remember that these users are not necessarily your ideal customers . In fact, they probably fall into the category of early adopters , which means they are very different than the majority of users.  A product cannot exist without early adopters, and yet, it’s crucial to understand how they differ from the rest because you're about to base your next product decisions on their behavior and feedback in your quest for a product/market fit , and you don't want those decisions to be based on biased information.   Let's start with who your early adopters are:  According to  Everett Rogers : early adopters belong to 2 small groups tha...

Roundups season continues here at the mobile spoon, and this time I've collected a few posts about product management, as founders of your own startups or as product leaders in bigger companies.  Let’s dig in: Product management basics Let’s start with some basics: B2B vs. B2C What’s the difference between managing B2B and B2C products? Here are 5 things I’ve learned when I switched from a large B2B company to a small B2C startup .  Product management is all about decisions Unfortunately, in most cases, there isn’t a right or wrong decision, just a set of priorities and constraints. To become a great product manager, you need to get into the right mindset and  turn tradeoffs and compromises into your best friends .  How do you prioritize your product backlog?  There are plenty of methods to prioritize product activities. Here are 5 unusual product management techniques you should try out someday ....

Feeling nostalgic, I decided to round up my top 5 product management guides. It's a quick trip down memory lane with my post popular posts. Let's dive in!  1. Product-led Growth Product-led growth has been around for years, but many product managers still struggle to implement it properly. I've put together a short guide to kick start my reader's knowledge about PLG - so if you're not sure about it - this 10-minute read will get you up to speed. Link: Product-led growth - the pocket guide every product person should read 2. MVPs Fed up with the endless "Is this really an MVP?" debates? Jump into my ultimate list of MVP flavors and settle those disputes once and for all. Link: 10 shades of MVP (or: how to develop a product without developing a product...) 3. Early adopters Noticed a shift from your first users to the later ones? You might be in the early adopter's trap. Dive into my guide on early adopters and their impact on your product's success....

  What's no-code? Who is it for? How far can you go with it? And Why is there such a hype around it lately? I've tried to answer those questions by talking to one of the best no-code hands-on experts out there: Zoe Chew.  When I was a student (without getting into embarrassing dates), I created a code-free gym management system using MS Access .  Access was a decent database that came with a powerful WYSIWYG UI designer on top. It was pretty good for small local businesses that wanted to manage their records digitally (with lists, lookups, forms, add/update/delete, etc.) and was considered the most widely used desktop database system in 2011 . I'm not sure Access is relevant nowadays (forgive me Microsoft if I'm wrong), but if you're following the tech trends you probably noticed a wide range of new no-code development tools and the huge hype around it.  I decided to ask the expert and contacted  Zoe Chew ( Website , Twitter , LinkedIn ), a product builder at...

In a world where quantitative data drives so many product decisions , interviewing users is still an important tool for understanding your users and get qualitative insights. I invited  Yael Oppenheim , a market and a user research consultant, and the founder of FitMyTime  (a platform for online live personal fitness and yoga classes) for coffee. Yael was kind enough to share some of her tips about conducting user interviews, and our conversation ended up with me interviewing her  for the mobile spoon 😉. Is that a remarkable journalism work or what? So here's an interview about how to conduct user interviews : When your product exists, and you’re talking to your users, there’s a clear set of rules to make sure you eliminate biases and get genuine answers. But how do you do this when the product does not exist yet, and there aren’t any users to talk to? You would think that doing user interviews without having an actual product (nor actual users) would m...