I enjoy meeting with clients that come in with invention ideas. I get to put on my engineering hat and talk about engineering and design and manufacturing as well as all the typical business aspects. I met with a group last week that brought in their product idea. In this first meeting they were eager and excited to tell me about what they were going to build and what great ideas they had for packages and versions and the future of the product. There is a battery required to power their product. Within the same conversation they shared their ideas of how to build a better battery. They were full of ideas!

Lots of energy, lots of ideas……….. I asked them to focus on what they were going to go to market with first. Again lots of ideas and lots of potential market segments. They were all valid ideas to consider at some point. I had pages of notes within the first half of the meeting.

Then I started asking the hard questions, trying to get them to focus on what they were going to market with first. I wanted them to focus on their first product, and only the first version of their first product and the first customers they were going to sell to.

In product development this is called the minimum viable product (MVP). It’s a strategy for fast and quantitative market testing and feedback. It means defining a product with the core features that allow the product to be sold and no more. No bells, no whistles, no options. The point is to design for the first set of possible customers, those early adopters that are usually forgiving, willing to give feedback and able to grasp a product vision from an early prototype. Developing the MVP and taking it to market helps to avoid running off on a tangent and wasting engineering hours building products that customers do not want and will not buy, and provides for maximizing the information learned from the first customers.

We agreed to focus on the version of the product that would bring in the first dollars for the business, spending 80% of the time on this alone. All those other great ideas of future versions, other products and developing a whole new battery to power the product we agreed to spend 20% or less time on – documenting those ideas in the engineering journals, but putting them into different parking lots for now. There will be a lot of ideas waiting in those parking lots to bring out again once the MVP is out and the feedback from customers flows in.

Are you spending 80% of your time focused on the core elements of your business that provide the most for you and your customers? Are you spending 20% of your time on the next iterations and the next products that will take your business to the next level? Are you getting the most information you can from your customers to know what to take out of the parking lots and when to do so? The goal is to avoid spending too much time on bright shiny ideas that are before their time. Park them and bring them out when the time is right.

If you need brainstorming help, call for an appointment 931-456-4910. We’re here to help.