As a PM, you know how expensive software development can be. Because of this, you should strive to validate ideas and assumptions before you commit to months of development. To mitigate risk and speed up development, many product organizations use minimum viable products/prototypes (MVPs).
While you probably hear a lot about MVPs, two MVP concepts — a concierge and the Wizard of Oz — rarely receive much attention. This article unpacks what they are and why you should consider giving them a shot.
Minimum viable products/prototypes, or MVPs for short, are the most minimalistic version of the experience you can serve to your end-users to validate your assumptions. The primary goal of MVPs is to reduce your initial investment and lower your exposure to risk.
Odds are, your first idea won’t be a winner. That’s okay though because MVPs allow you to save resources and learn on-the-go which directions are worth investing further in.
With a concierge MVP, you offer the product or service manually. In most cases, you don’t even need any software yet.
By serving your customers directly and interacting with them, you can maximize your ability to learn about their preferences and behaviors while validating key concepts. Given how much effort it requires to pull off, it’s best suited for initial validation with a limited number of customers.
The following offers two examples of successful concierge MVPs:
This personalized meal planning and delivery service started with the founder talking to each customer, gathering food preferences, preparing a shopping list, and recommending recipes, just like a personal concierge would do.
Before becoming a fully automated robo-advisor, Wealthfront had its founders individually consult each client’s needs and preferences and fine-tuning their portfolio before building an automated platform.
If you haven’t seen a Wizard of Oz, then spoiler alert: the ominous wizard, a feared antagonist, wasn’t actually a wizard; instead, he used various levers behind the scenes to manipulate the world and make it seem like magic.
A Wizard of Oz MVP is based on the same principles. You make your users believe that the product completes a specific task for them, while in reality, humans do the work in the background.
In other words, the frontend layer of the product is usually there, but human actions support a very limited backend layer. That allows you to test a partially-working solution before investing in a fully-fledged product.
Two of the most well-known examples of Wizard of Oz MVPs include:
This online shoe-selling website had an interesting start. To confirm people’s willingness to purchase shoes online, the founders themselves visited local stores and took pictures of available shoes. Then, when an order was placed, they went to the store to purchase the shoes and then sent them to the buyer. No inventory, no stock management, no shipping tracking, just humans.
Before building a full scheduling automation pipeline, Buffer started with a simple landing page. After registration, the founders manually scheduled and sent the social media posts. This allowed them to validate the need for social media scheduling before investing in complex pipelines and automation.
You might’ve noticed that these two types of MVPs have some key similarities. Both strive to save resources by using human labor instead of fully built and automated solutions.
However, have you noticed a critical difference?
In a concierge MVP, customers interact directly with a human. On the other hand, with a Wizard of Oz, customers interact with a frontend layer of the product and are unaware of the fact that a real person makes their requests.
This difference is critical when choosing the right MVP approach.
A concierge MVP is your best choice for exploration.
The biggest advantage of working with customers directly is that you can talk and interact with them and observe their behaviors and reactions on the go. If something doesn’t go according to your expectations or if you notice patterns, you can ask follow-up questions. This can lead to an insane amount of insights.
However, the biggest problem with this approach is the inflated quality of service you deliver. By serving as a personal concierge, you provide a significantly higher quality of service than a mere website.
This can be an issue down the road because your customers might value a personalized diet from you way more than what an app or a website can provide.
Wizard of Oz is a great choice for validation.
Although you can’t get as many insights and observations as you can with a concierge MVP (after all, you can’t interact directly with customers not to break the illusion), it allows you to better gauge the satisfaction your customers would get from a fully functional product.
A Wizard of Oz usually performs less than an end-product, so if you can make people fall in love with your MVP, they’ll most likely like the final product even more.
No one really debates whether you should use an MVP. At this point, they have such widespread adoption that the question has shifted to what MVP to start with. Concierge and Wizard of Oz MVPs aren’t always as popular because they’re most suited for innovation.
If you’re building another e-commerce, investment, or social media platform, you can base your assumptions on other product learnings. When there’s a track of successful products in your target segment, you’re usually better off starting with a single-feature product or a landing page.
But if your idea is novel, exploring it with a concierge and then validating it with a Wizard of Oz might be a good call.
I’ll close with an example. Some time ago, I was consulting a startup that wanted to build an app that allowed you to take photos of all the items in your wardrobe and then propose outfit combinations. It was a rather new territory, so we started by offering personalized home visits by fashion specialists to help organize the wardrobe.
It turned out that even though people were initially interested in the concept, most of them didn’t like the outfit combinations done by professionals. They still preferred their own choices. Imagine how expensive it would’ve been if we had learned that after developing a fully working app.
Featured image source: IconScout
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