MVP Development Agency: Artkai’s Strategic Approach to Market-Ready Products

Approached wisely and crafted thoughtfully, a minimal viable product enables a business to breathe life into the idea and start engaging users as soon as possible. In this article, the Artkai agency team is sharing its extensive practical experience on how the MVP approach benefits clients’ businesses. 

Being an experienced MVP development services provider, Artkai creates and launches 5-10 MVP development projects per year, facilitating the entire process from scratch, whether the client is a small, daring tech startup or a big enterprise. With that constantly diversifying background, our team developed a productive, results-oriented approach, ensuring that the MVP becomes a strategic phase of the product development and its market success.

1. Strategic Goals That Our Clients Achieve with Artkai’s MVP Approach

2. MVP Creation Benefits and Values Client’s Business Gets with Artkai 

3. Key Principles of Artkai’s MVP Development Approach 

4. MVP Development Stages 

5. Case Study: SaaS Platform for Educational Institutions. Successful MVP Step-by-Step 

6. Bottom Line on Artkai’s MVP Development Experience 

Let’s review how Artkai’s MVP development agency approach helps businesses reach their goals as well as test and boost their ideas. Here, we outline the process that enables us to successfully launch multiple MVPs annually for our clients and invite you to review the details of a practical case that demonstrates how we applied this approach to a complex SaaS platform in the education sector.

Strategic Goals That Our Clients Achieve with Artkai’s MVP Approach

In Artkai, we follow the primary principle that a minimum viable product shouldn’t be seen as just a rough draft, just allowing the business to leap into the market more quickly. Instead, it is approached as a strategic step, laying the foundation for the product's success and allowing the business to:

Describing our MVP creation process and viewpoint, the Artkai team metaphorically compares it with the idea that we help the client who aims to build a complex, innovative vehicle to go all the way and jump into the market making it real as a decent yet highly effective bike which will help to test the hypotheses and real-time user needs.

By building a bike that is an effective and practical solution to users’ problems, our team follows the prospective vision and immediately sets the technical direction for the subsequent stages of custom product improvement.

MVP Creation Benefits and Values Client’s Business Gets with Artkai 

There are several essential reasons why our clients from various business sectors choose Artkai as a partner for MVP development services, as mentioned in their reviews and testimonials.

Key Principles of Artkai’s MVP Development Approach

Having created numerous minimum viable products for various business spheres and objectives, we’ve refined a set of key principles that form a solid basis for the effective, goal-driven MVP development process, delivering both business-friendly and user-friendly results.

Discovery-First Mindset

When a business idea is hot, crispy, and fresh, the temptation is high to jump right into building and creating instead of spending time looking around. And that’s the thin ice your business doesn’t want to step on. Practice shows that a careful and comprehensive discovery phase considerably reduces risks and concerns that may arise at subsequent stages while also providing a broader outlook on how to develop the overall strategy, not only for the MVP but also for the post-MVP level.

What’s more, the discovery stage with well-accomplished market research helps to get a big picture of the goals of the business, solving specific users’ problems, its technical feasibility, and its ability to do that effectively, with scalability for further product growth in mind. And don’t worry that it could slow down the process; on the contrary, it makes it more rapid, thought-out, and confident for the next steps.

Scalability and Future-Proofing

Concentrating on delivering the MVP, which can be implemented at optimal timing and whose core functionality will meet the needs of early adopters from the outset, our team considers the next stages of product growth from the very start. That means that even creating a minimal version of the product idea, we envision opportunities for potential improvements and extensions at subsequent steps, such as refining the user interface design, selecting a tech stack and cloud-based solutions, or considering possible integrations.

This way, the Artkai team provides the client with a scalable and future-proof product ready for not only a successful release but also dealing with a quickly growing audience of users and enhancing the product according to their real interactions with the product.

Agile Development and Lean Execution

Creating an efficient MVP, it’s critical to focus on the limited functionality and avoid overbuilding. Focusing on the client’s business objectives and their customers’ primary needs, we prioritize core features to meet them both. That allows us to release a version of the product that is lean, straightforward, yet valuable, functional, cost-saving, and problem-solving. This path leads to an MVP functionality that enables our client to quickly check, prove, and refine their business idea, as well as track user behavior and collect real-life early feedback.

Adaptive Product and Project Management

After multiple projects on MVP development services, it becomes clear that different products and client teams require different personalized approaches to managing processes at all levels.

Some clients come with a clear product vision, a long-term strategy, already accomplished market research, and deep expert knowledge of the domain; what they lack is the ability to actually create a live product that meets their business needs and goals. So, what they seek is an experienced and reliable full-stack team that can cover all the creative stages and collaborate with them to build their idea into a working and scalable product, with their intense presence and active participation at every step. 

However, there are also other clients for whom this MVP is one of the multiple points in their complex system of business goals. With their hands full of diverse tasks, stakeholders are often not ready or willing to devote much time and effort to all the creative stages of the MVP development process. Clients of this type seek a team of experts who will take greater responsibility for managing the project more independently and deliver the expected and successful outcome without requiring stakeholder engagement at every step.

The ability to offer both of the mentioned options is another significant benefit we’ve achieved through practice and offer to our clients as part of our MVP development services. Whichever approach appeals to our client, we are well-equipped and trained to provide it, ensuring maximum efficiency and comfort throughout the process of creating and launching their minimum viable product successfully. 

Team Cross-Functionality and Diversity

With a varied background as an MVP development agency, Artkai gathered a well-rehearsed team of professionals that covers all the possible stages of creating a minimum viable product in any business sphere. With experienced business analysts, solution architects, designers, developers, QAs, and project managers, we ensure a cross-functional approach that supports all stages of desktop, web, or mobile MVP creation, release, and testing.

Transparent Communication

One of the key principles that our clients appreciate is our openness and readiness to provide transparent communication with stakeholders, keeping them on the same page and ensuring clarity at every step of the MVP software development process. This principle is crucial for setting a trustworthy and friendly process of alignment with business objectives, a clear vision of deadlines, an understanding of expectations, and smooth delivery.

MVP Development Stages

The path our clients follow with us, from idea to live and functional MVP, usually goes through several major stages.

Product Discovery & Research

At this stage, we emerge into the idea of the product and thoroughly communicate with the clients to make sure what business needs they face, what goals they strive to achieve by launching the product, and which customer pain points the software product addresses for the target users. 

Scope Definition & Planning

When the product is called minimal, it shouldn’t be confused with primitive. What’s more, even being minimal, it should be totally viable and provide the expected value. 

That means that at the next stage, we have to do the foundation job that considerably defines all the further success: carefully choose which features are core and critical for this product version and provide the highest impact on both the success of the MVP functionality and its ability to quickly scale after the mission is completed and this initial success is achieved. After the features are prioritized and approved in close communication with the client, this stage involves forming a clear backlog of tasks and stages, as well as careful planning of time, resources, and architecture. 

UX/UI Design

At this stage, the creative process starts, concise, focused, and goal-oriented. The team explores ways to approach the issues users will encounter when using the software product, considers various possible scenarios and user stories, and devises user-friendly solutions.

This results in wireframes building the core of the product interaction and design concepts that allow us to agree on the style, tone, and voice of how the product will communicate with target users and test usability solutions. This phase sets the basis for a solid, consistent, and efficient design system that will allow us to build the MVP architecture design, which is intuitive, problem-solving, and easy to use. 

MVP Development & QA

At this stage, we actually build the minimum viable product for the client within the process built on agile sprints that allow for flexibility of solutions and procedures and support transparency of the process with demo-ready builds. The product is developed, undergoes various tests, and includes all the necessary integrations and technical solutions that enable its effective release and market testing.

Release, Testing & Post-Launch Support

Finally, the MVP is live! However, it’s an important milestone rather than the final point, as the release just opens the door to another phase where early user feedback and interactions with it are analyzed to support the iterative process of enhancing the product and refining the solutions. 

Scaling Readiness

For a deep analysis of how the MVP functionality worked for early adopters and aligned with their objectives at the post-launch stage, we facilitate performance monitoring, track user behavior, gather user feedback, and use the collected information to plan future improvements and further strategic product scaling. 

Now, let’s see how this path takes an idea to a usable and viable product, using the example of one of our recent MVP projects for our client at the intersection of edutech and SaaS products.

Case Study: SaaS Platform for Educational Institutions. Successful MVP Step-by-Step

In one of our recent MVP development projects, Artkai received a request from a company that aimed to create a user-friendly platform that would help educational institutions elevate their documentation and communication processes to the next level. In general terms, the product presented a SaaS platform that had to address the issues that CRM products solve for businesses, but considering all the specific aspects of both the sphere and the target audience's needs, which considerably differ from enterprise or e-commerce goals.

With numerous documentation, communication touchpoints, and procedures, prominent educational institutions struggled to consolidate them all into a single, clear, and easy-to-use system that would be both convenient and effective in handling a wide range of diverse data. 

The market didn’t offer corresponding solutions, so observing this opportunity provided by the market demand and understanding the specific nature and needs of the mentioned domain, our clients accepted the challenge and decided to create the much-needed digital product. That’s where our collaboration began, and after thoroughly analyzing the situation, we embarked on a journey that led to a successful MVP, paving the way for a complex problem-solving product.

MVP Challenges

There were several factors that made this MVP project challenging and special.

Firstly, this was the case when the market was close to the blue ocean, with little competition in the domain. Being domain experts with extensive knowledge, the stakeholders approached us with a deep understanding of the potential users’ problems and a clear vision of the product they wanted to build to address them.

Therefore, in this case, at the research and discovery stage, we concentrated more on analyzing solutions that helped solve similar problems in other businesses and social spheres, for example, enterprise or ecommerce domains, as well as solutions that wouldn’t work for the education sphere, while also delving deep into the current existing ways of dealing with data collection, systematization, documentation, and communication tools in large educational institutions and associations.

Secondly, the aspect of personal data security, confidentiality, and information protection had to be considered to find the solutions that would be effective. In such a data-oriented and data-sensitive product, not only the aspects of usability and high performance, but also the tech solutions for high security and protection levels had to be considered from the very start of planning.

What’s more, we had to find a solution that would be easily scaled at the post-MVP stage to ensure that the product would remain secure and stable with a growing number of users and an increasing amount of data.

Thirdly, the client had a very specific timeline, determined by certain calendar milestones that were crucial for the product to reach its audience. So, they turned to our team as an experienced MVP development agency ready to accept this challenge.

Considering the path to an efficient MVP functionality and technical feasibility, we also had to take into account particular events in the sphere that occur rarely but have a great impact on the industry and gather major players in the segment. These events provided the client with a significant opportunity to effectively reach the core target audience and offer the product to early adopters. 

Understanding the importance of that factor for business and marketing objectives, we had to carefully prioritize the core features, check out the acceptance criteria, and plan the backlog and roadmap, which would allow the team and the client to meet the required timeline and get improvements released into an MVP according to the schedule of events critical for the business success. 

MVP UI/UX and Tech Stack

Creating the user interface design based on user stories and thinking of how to deliver a positive user experience at every step of interaction with the product, we agreed upon the UI/UX concept based on the neat and functional interface which was consistent and employing mental patterns to make the interaction with the product intuitive while the way it communicates to the users friendly and helpful.

We considered how this serious, professional, data-heavy platform could be made learnable and usable, thereby reducing cognitive load and supporting productive performance in organizing vast amounts of data and satisfying users’ goals. This way, we achieved a balance, creating a professional and serious product while also making it simple, aesthetic, and friendly.

Another critical aspect of product success was creating a well-thought-out architecture for the platform from the outset, taking into account that multiple users would deal with numerous documents and a substantial amount of data, all of which needed to be organized and executed effectively.

As for the tech stack selection, we chose the actual and well-tested components that would ensure not only the efficiency of the MVP but also scalability for future stages. Specifically, we utilized React for the front-end development of the web application and Node.js for the back-end development.

Obviously, from the early stages, we had to build the product architecture on a cloud-based solution to ensure its scalability, security, and capacity to handle large amounts of data and high product usage intensity. AWS and cloud-native technologies, such as AWS S3 and RDS for storage, ECS and Lambda for data processing, SNS for communication, and Cognito for secure and effective authorization, enabled our team to achieve this goal.

By applying cloud-native technologies, we delivered an MVP ready to scale for a vast number of users while ensuring separation and complete confidentiality and security of data for different organizations and institutions. Having considered all these aspects at the early stage of creating the MVP architecture design, we sped up and solidified the software development process.

MVP Development Outcome

A focused and agile development approach to all the steps of developing and releasing a minimum viable product of the SaaS solution for educational institutions let us provide the client with the results they expected, as well as set the foundation for the effective product growth and improvement to take the stable position on the market and lead the company to more sales and higher profit.

Bottom Line on Artkai’s MVP Development Experience

As you could see, our MVP software development approach is a well-tested method to ensure a successful start for complex products with promising prospects. A minimum viable product, developed with deep consideration of the market and the client’s goals, as well as the potential product users’ needs, is a cost-effective and user-friendly solution that allows a business to enter the market and validate its product idea.

If you're seeking an MVP development agency that can bring your business idea to life and provide comprehensive support, ultimately leading to a user-driven, technically sound, and future-proof product, we're here to help. Get in touch, and let’s discuss how to bring your product to market and let it shine.