Our MVP release!
Hello folks and welcome back to KBD blog! Today we will present our MVP solution, which we have developed based on the interviews we had with Solita’s employees! But first, we will let you guys know our new member Kirsi a little better!
So, Kirsi’s experience on software
development field is valuable to us and Kirsi is a perfect match to our team!
But, without further parley, we present our Value Proposition Canvas. The idea of this canvas is to precisely define pains and gains our customer profile face while getting their jobs done and also, it visualizes the value we create in our offering (Strategyzer 2020). We created the value proposition canvas before we had interviewed all the needed employees, so this canvas is made based our softer approaches to our customer. I mean, that it doesn’t include our MVP yet, but the MVP is created based on these same thoughts, so we didn’t see the point to do it all over again.
First in the canvas, we chose our main
customer segment or user group which in this case is Solita’s employees. After
that we recognized the functional, emotional and social jobs our customer needs
to have done. Then, we identified pains and gains in their work. What are the
problems our customer may face when trying to get their jobs done and what are
the positive outcomes the customer expects when getting the job done. After
that, we named our products that our value proposition offers. Lastly, we
defined pain relievers and gain creators in their work and compound the interaction
between them with arrows.
Then to the exiting part! Our MVP description, which is presented both verbally and with our storyboard. Our MVP is a platform which would be introduced to fill in important information on a project-by-project basis. For example, who is working on the project, the project client and the technologies used in the project. Projects would have a person in charge who would be responsible for supplementing and updating the project information on the platform. The platform would also maintain information about people and their skills to make it easy to link to projects.
The platform would have an administrator who makes sure that the content does not spread into your hands. In addition, the platform would have the opportunity to tamper with, for example, course content. The idea of tampering would be that a “publication” that has received a lot of thumbs or likes has been perceived as useful and topical. Downstream thumbnails or dislikes could be removed from the platform by the administrator. Old projects could be archived to keep the platform clean.
Then to our MVP storyboard:
Our main hypothesis is that “We believe
that our platform for project-information and people’s skills will help Solita’s
employees to boost knowledge sharing within and between projects.” After creating
this hypothesis we noticed that we need to create hypothesis, which can be
evaluated earlier than just after we have delivered the platform to our customer.
Our more easily testable hypothesis is “We believe that Solita’s employees think that our platform has the potential to become their new tool to boost knowledge
sharing within and between projects.” Testing this hypothesis is easy and it
will be tested with survey. So, after creating the MVP and the hypothesis, we
decided to test it with Solita’s employees. We
created a short survey with Microsoft Forms, where we verbally explained the
idea and asked what they though about it. We sent the survey to the ones we interviewed
and couple other Solita’s employees. To our resentment, we didn’t get that much responses to the survey, but we didn’t let that bother us. Based on the survey,
we got feedback, that basically our idea is very good. We asked how they feel about
our MVP in a scale 1-10, 10 being the best, our average review was 8. Here are
presented the positive open feedback we got from the employees:
•
“Project
information extremely important”
•
”Good
as a basic idea, helps to meet projects and experts and to manage and develop
abilities”
•
“The
platform has the potential to help e.g. project resourcing to quickly find the
right people for your projects”
•
“The
thumbs up or likes sounds very promising”
Also, we got some constructive feedback
which is extremely helpful and important to us. For example, we need to consider
if the learning platform is truly necessary because it may be too heavy to
maintain. Also, we need to consider how to motivate people to use it and who
would be the person to maintain the whole platform. In addition to these,
someone mentioned, that we could think if it would be possible to link our platform
in their system, where they maintain people information and their skills. But mainly, based
on our survey, we think our MVP is worth developing forward.
Since the last post, we have actively developed the storyboard, value proposition canvas, presentation, survey and our MVP together. We all have contributed equally, because that is the most effective way to do and learn things. Also we have been orientated Kirsi to our team together, and we've had couple meetings together as a whole team since last posts. Remotely, of course.
Now, it’s Friday night 9.30 pm and we are going to have an awesome weekend, hope you are too!
-KBD
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Based on the feedback we got from the course personnel regarding our posts, we added here some thoughts about the most important features of our MVP. The most important features are, that the platform would include possibility to save information about the projects and to find information about what methods and techniques have been used in different projects. So that if someone needs to find more information or needs to find someone who is expert on for example Node.js, she or he can just search projects and people from the platform, who have been working with Node.js. In the MVP it is possible to see the contact information about the employees, so it's easy to contact them. While creating the first prototype of our MVP, we also decided to leave out the course-function, because it would have been too much of a work at this point. So if we had time and resources later to continue this development project, we could take the course-function back to our product for future iterations. Also, it is possible to take the course-function in use later in the platform.
Also, there was a feedback regarding our interview data, and what pains and well-functioning parts there was according to the interviews. Based on our interviews, one pain is that if you need help, you will shout it out in Slack, where is already many hundred different channels. Searching help from there is not systematic. To this we try to answer with our platform, where you can search the topic you need help with, and then contact directly someone who knows about it. However, the culture in Solita is good regarding the knowledge sharing, and that Solita already has a system, where is maintained information about employees and their skills. In future, it could be possible to link this system with our platform, so that when you search topics or people from our platform, it could show data from the other system about Solita's employees.
Also, we though about the hypotheses more after the feedback. We noticed, that we want to have some hypotheses to be tested by testing the prototype. So, based on Value Proposition Canvas, we created these hypotheses:
"It is easy to find and read the project information in the prototype." By this, we will test that knowledge sharing is more visible and it's easy to find information about old projects and to find help when needed.
"It is easy to add and edit project in the prototype." With this hypothesis, we will test that using the system is easy, because based on our questionnaire-feedback of the first MVP, the system and information there should be very easy to maintain, so that project managers keeps the information up to date.
These hypotheses will be tested while testing the prototype, and the results of the testing will be presented later.
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References:
Strategyzer. (2020). The value
proposition canvas. Retrieved from: strategyzer.com/canvas/value-proposition-canvas.
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