The minimum viable product, as many founders understand it, does not reflect the reality of how products are developed today.

Building something valuable is no longer about proving a novel concept as quickly as possible. Instead, the modern MVP exercise focuses on creating a version of an idea that is both different and superior to what is currently available. Most of us aren't building for a completely new market. Rather, we're looking for ways to improve existing categories. We need an MVP concept that allows founders and product leaders to iterate on their initial ideas to compete in an existing market.

The MVP practice of creating a hacky product as quickly and cheaply as possible to validate the product is no longer viable. Many product categories are already saturated with numerous alternatives, and to truly test the viability of any new idea, you must build something significantly better.

That approach requires deep expertise in different areas that software agencies can deliver. However, most agencies are still focused on feature factory delivery. That’s a delivery focused on outputs, not outcomes, rarely giving the desired results.

Let me share our approach to working with client problems and align the results you want to achieve. This is part of our work on the concept of Empowered Software Agency. This is our desired clients journey.

Diagnose Before Prescribing

When clients come to us with a new app or feature request, they naturally come up with a solution and ask for delivery. That solution is based on the best client knowledge of implementing it. We should not stop here. We can only develop the best solution when we understand a deep need. That means that we should ask:

• Why do they want to build the solution (using the five whys technique)?
• What is the underlying problem they want to solve?
• How will they measure the success of the solution?
• What are the client's constraints (financial, timeline, dependencies, etc.)?

Context is the key to understanding what the client has in mind.

Build approach

We can take advantage of our expertise when we understand the client’s deep need for the requested app or feature. We know best how to validate the app idea, the cost of building a solution, our approach, and the complexity. We also leverage our experience in other projects.

That should lead us to build a roadmap (a strategy/plan/approach) to reach client goals. We should use the best techniques:

• like root cause analysis,
• analyzing user data,
• talking to users,
• use our expertise

to deeply understand the problem and prepare a plan the client can understand. Our goal is to define the problem and approach to solve that problem.