Often, when working on an innovative solution, and, in particular, a software startup, the team does not always succeed in accurately predicting how the target audience will accept it. Therefore, it is important to act flexibly: evaluate what works best, and change the course of action based on these conclusions. One of the approaches that help to effectively translate these ideas into practice is the Lean methodology. Below we will describe in more detail how it works and what stages it consists of.
What Is the Essence of Lean Methodology?
The starting point in the Lean philosophy is to provide value to the final solution for its potential users. Therefore, everything that does not add this value should be perceived as things that need to be eliminated.
The main three goals of the Lean methodology are:
- Reduce financial, time, and human costs for project implementation;
- Guarantee the quality of the final product that will satisfy potential users;
- Provide this quality within a fixed cost.
Speaking more specifically about software development for startups, these goals are transformed into one global task: not to spend huge efforts and a lot of money on the development of redundant parts of the project. In particular, the startup software, implemented according to the Lean philosophy, aims to quickly launch the minimum viable product (MVP), which will allow you to receive feedback from users, and on its basis, optimize your solution and refine it with new features. Thanks to this method, it becomes clear what exactly the target audience is interested in and what they are willing to pay for.
Thus, this approach helps to reduce the number of pitfalls that may accompany the development process:
- Inefficient business plan;
- Redundant functionality;
- Taking too long to agree on project requirements;
- Extra steps in the startup product development cycle.
4 Essential Stages of This Methodology
The Lean startup methodology consists of four main stages. Let’s look at them in more detail.
- Idea. At this stage of a startup development process, you have to formulate your business idea in the form of requirements for the future project and the tasks that it is designed to solve.
- Development and launch of MVP. This startup software development stage involves choosing features that should solve the main problems of your target audience and combining them into a minimum viable product.
- Data collection and evaluation of the result. After launching the MVP, you should collect feedback from real users and determine what elements of your software development startup solution need to be improved.
- Functional refinement. And finally, you must implement the planned improvements to re-launch the already updated product and test it again with the target audience. These steps must be repeated until you get a software startup that allows you to achieve optimal end-user satisfaction.
Conclusion
As you can see, the main principle of a Lean methodology in the context of software for startups is to constantly test, develop, and improve the solution based on feedback. If you are looking for a company that will be ready to implement this approach for the benefit of your project, please, contact us, and we will do our best to create a cost-effective and profitable solution.