Don't Ship a Product, Ship Value: Start Your Minimum Viable Product With a Solution

I don't know how to start these videos so I thought it would be more interesting if I was holding a plant but when I started hi everyone my name is janessa I'm a product manager at Congress and I'm going to be talking to you about Minimum Viable products I am well aware that when some people hear the term Minimum Viable Product their brain fires a synapse that says abort all non-critical function and I get it unless you are a huge nerd like some people in the room then minimum viable products probably doesn't excite you but the truth of the matter is it's very likely that you have used a Minimum Viable Product and are may even be using one now so in this talk we're going to discuss ways that you can utilize them strategically in ways that will help your game help your product help your love life I lied about that last one I'm on my second cup of coffee so you're just gonna have to

bear with me so without further ado let me whisk you away into the wonderful world of MVPs I'm so sorry I guess before we get started I could introduce myself some more hi I'm janessa I'm a product manager at congregate some of the things that I do are I worked on our PC gaming platform cartridge I work on the website data and security which is super interesting - about 2% of the earth population I'm among them and various other tasks that nobody wants to do because I'm a product manager and that's what being a product manager is all about if that photo looks kind of familiar it's because I took it like 20 minutes ago so anyway congra is a mobile publisher and open platform for browser-based games you may remember us as the flash game website you would secretly log into to play games while you were in high school history class well we don't necessarily condone you playing games in high school we do appreciate you logging on some of

our mobile game titles include idle frontier Zen idle animations are down bit heroes and pocket politics so I've said Minimum Viable Product handful of times now it might even be 20 I don't know I've blacked out up until this point but if we were to put a definition to it what would that definition be well I will tell you the smallest solution you can build that will bring the most value to your users there are a lot of ways that you can utilize an MVP but in this talk specifically we're going to cover how you can use it when you're building a new product or when you're adding new features to your games I think before we go further it's important that we do my third-favorite activity which is setting expectations what is or isn't an MVP and MVP is not just something that you've built and that you put in front of a user there's more strategy and there's more research behind it and the example that I like to use is you have found a problem that your users have and we have an idea of how we want to go about solving it an

MVP is not we made a thing let's see if anyone likes it now there's nothing wrong with making a thing and seeing if anyone likes it but it's not an MVP why is an MVP something that you should use well to put it lightly everything is expensive actions that involve resources or time or development or meetings it all costs money and chances are money is something that you have to take into consideration when you're building your product when you're working on your game and MVPs are helpful because they allow you to engage your users while using minimal resources to get immediate and useful feedback if you were to just build something without knowing anything about your users and put it in front of a person you may just get feedback that it's bad getting feedback that this is bad is not very usable or helpful it doesn't really get you anywhere starting with an MVP helps reduce the chance that all you learn is this is bad therefore saving you time and money as you build I'm a visual person and I like to

visualize this process and I also think it helps other folks when they're learning about it kind of understand it a little bit more this is a very popular diagram you've probably seen floating around the web or maybe even taped up on your office somewhere I think it does a great job showing at a high level what an MVP might look like the main takeaway that I want you to have is that an MVP is shipping something useful to your audience in this diagram you give a user a tire that's not necessarily the most useful thing if the end goal is for you to get them to location aid from location a to location B alternatively giving them a skateboard well it might not be the end solution might not even be the best solution it's still a solution and it gives them something of value it also gives you feedback which can shape future iterations of your product to be totally honest I have a love-hate relationship with this diagram I think it does a really good job if you were to use it to explain what an MVP is to like your drunk uncle at Christmas or Thanksgiving

it does a really good job of showing you know what a high level of what an MVP is but I don't think it does a great job showing how an MVP should go again if we were to look at this diagram the product jumps are pretty big especially like scooter to bike it's a huge product iteration motorcycle to car is a huge product iteration it's also quite expensive from a manufacturing standpoint and frankly I find it to be a little misleading if you were to apply this practice to your own product so I like to use a diagram that makes more sense in terms of product iteration but it's awesome slightly more appropriate for GDC tada the Nintendo handheld gaming family when I talk about MVP iteration I really like to use Nintendo's handheld gaming tree evolution you pick as an example because it's more realistic in that it's more of a gradual iteration upon each next product so there are four components of an MVP we're gonna talk about each and

every one of them the first one is starting with the problem discovering the solution gathering feedback and then iterating now I know that the title of my talk is start your Minimum Viable Product with the solution but actually you should be starting with the problem you can't get a solution if you don't have a problem when you start with a problem for your MVP the two things you must keep in mind are one you know who you are building your product for and two you know those users well enough to know what their problems are which means you have to talk to them sorry if we were to look at an example of an MVP congregate itself is actually a great example of an MVP Emily and Jim Greer saw this problem with Indy game developers were having with distributing their games partly because they knew their users partly because they were their users themselves the solution was to build congregate which if you are not familiar right now is a website that empowers indie devs to have more control of their game distribution and the website you see today with the addition of chat the awards the

companions as the result of years and years of iteration feedback from that original MVP and actually the slide that you see here is from Emily Greer's talked a few years ago in 2016 she did a post-mortem on the website and the first ten years of congregate which is really fascinating so I pulled that slide from her talk to show what their MVP was and then what was actually next so you've built your MVP or you've built something and you're laying in bed gazing into the abyss wondering how do I know when I am done building ask yourself does this solve my users problem you don't need to solve every solution you just need to start with one solution this part is really hard because it's where you need to flex you're saying no muscle remember that the M stands for minimum maximum you shoot your MVP now what feedback feedback is how you help your MVP grow and stay viable which is also the V part of the word if case you missed that what does it mean then something is viable

viable means that your product has the ability to grow and function properly in order for something to be viable to your users you need two things you need to listen to them you need to listen to them in the first place and understand what they need and two you need to keep listening to them forever and ever and ever you can't just listen to them in the beginning and then stop you have to keep talking to them and listening sorry to break that news to you how do you know what feedback to listen to depending on how you're gathering feedback and we'll talk about some examples in a moment but I can certainly feel like you're trying to drink from a fire hose to top it all off depending on the source of feedback much of it and might not actually be helpful for example like most of Twitter side note I really hope the man in that photo is okay but I do think it's funny well it all comes down to your vision when you are gathering feedback ask yourself is this related to our Minimum Viable Product that we started with does it align with our overall product vision most importantly will this help us add more value what you'll find is you'll actually be saying no a lot to a lot of the feedback that

you receive I absolutely love this tweet by Insomniac I went to cross stitch it I want to hang it on a wall in my living room listening doesn't mean we will always do what people tell us to you we hear you hearing doesn't mean we act or follow once you've gotten useful feedback from your users it's time to iterate and add further value onto your product it's really important here that you do not iterate just for the sake of iteration when you iterate just for the sake of iteration you're really just wasting money in terms of an MVP we've talked about the four steps of a Minimum Viable Product now I'd like to talk about some more examples specifically here at Kongregate how we gather feedback how we iterate upon that feedback so that you can take this and apply it to your real life maybe even your romantic life I don't know internal testing is a really great way to get quick feedback and eyes on your game simply by recruiting folks within your workplace even close friends and family could arguably looped into the internal play pass play testing tool here at congregate the teams will have a

small group of play testers usually one person is running the play test and another is taking notes each person will be on their own device playing the game they'll start around the same time and as observations come out they'll say oh I'm having a hard time in this part or oh I really like the art at this at this point in the game the person who's taking notes will write all of that down and at the end of the play test the moderator will send out a short survey to get an idea of how it went one of our teams in the survey they send out they put the vision statement of the game and ask does the game you play fall in line with this vision statement yes or no I think that's a great idea because it helps give you the team a good read on are we following our vision statement do our users also think that we are following the vision statement we've set for ourselves and for the game here at Kongregate we're incredibly lucky to have a seasoned team of

community members who utilize among many things the power of community forums oftentimes community managers will create topics cific feedback threads for new features partially so that players can stay on topic they want to but partially also so that the feedback is a bit more organized it also gives angry players a place to be angry instead of just putting it all over the forums additionally the CS teams here at congregate are really good at getting ahead of anticipating questions about new features or changes before the release and most of that is they just know their players and their communities really well it's really true that a good Community Manager is worth their weight in what's worth more than gold platinum dark matter diamonds you know what I mean time for some real talk to be perfectly transparent it's oftentimes difficult for CS members to get all the information they need from a dev team prior to release going out and this is

really a prevalent trend anywhere you go I do recommend taking time to ask your CS team how they can be better supported prior to any release I mean they are the first line of defense when you get that feedback firehose so if they're gonna be a human body shield they might as well be a little bit prepared you know what I mean another great option for utilizing and collecting feedback is a player council our team on bit heroes utilizes this it's a great option for a platform that has established audience and/or active community the bit Heroes Council is made up of players who have been elected by their peers the community manager community communicates with the council via discord and shares the feedback with the product owners the council itself is split by roles such as beta testers but also includes a panel of meta specialists such as tank DPS and so on the bit heroes team will often use the council not only as feedback for upcoming features but recently released ones when the team released elemental attacks into the system this updates

sort of nerfed all previous builds in that attack bonuses we're now in effective against any elemental attacks utilizing the player Council specifically the meta specialists the team were able to change that feature based on their feedback the end result was changing the previous builds to become 75% effective on a bonus attack we've talked about a few use cases where feedback has brought a fair amount of success now let's talk about the opposite of that cartridge for those of you who are unfamiliar cartridge is a PC gaming platform we wanted to make a community that was very welcoming and supportive for these indie game devs as well for the people who play their games when we were in closed beta we did what any sane person would do and we sent out surveys to our users so that we could gather feedback and test the proverbial waters of how we were doing so far and this was kind of our first misstep first of all the surveys were not designed well there are folks whose entire career

is dedicated to designing a good survey it's really easy to make a survey bad I have learned I cannot understate this enough invest time in writing your survey use your test your survey if you can hire someone to write the survey that would probably be best secondly there was just too too many qualitative questions which meant there was just a lot of qualitative data to parse now qualitative data is important but also very difficult to interpret again there are people who dedicate their lives to gathering and organizing this feedback properly and I have nothing but crazy respect for them but if you get too much of it and you don't have someone who knows how to parse it it can be a nightmare lastly and I'll touch on this a little bit more we ignored red flags that we were getting in the feedback this is very important if you know for a

fact that you are gathering feedback from your primary users meaning people who you know your product is for and the feedback they are giving you is trending in a specific direction that feedback will not change just because you go from closed to open beta it won't you'll just be seeing more of that data in the same direction so if we were to look at some examples from our feedback we really did get a lot of positive feedback mostly about the design a lot of people liked it and and if you take a chance to go look at the design it really is beautiful the team did a fantastic job there the thing about design is even the best design will not save you if you're users don't see the value in your product which we will see momentarily a lot of users thought cartridge was supposed to be congregate 2.0 aka free-to-play games I we don't have enough time to go into this like this could be a whole nother

GDC talk but getting this feedback that your players are so far from your product vision is a huge red flag you could not get a bigger red flag than this as a result nobody was buying games because of above everyone everyone thought this was supposed to be congregate version 2.0 probably the harshest feedback of all was it was slowly becoming clear that cartridge wasn't solving any problems that weren't being solved by many other established platforms it's like dog like steam like at the time the newly released proverbial silverback gorilla that was the epic game store in a sane age a new gaming platform is actually perceived by the target audience as a hassle versus the solution ask any developer who's been review bombed because they decided to release exclusively on epic many people take severe personal offense when you suggest they have to have multiple game libraries

I don't like ending on a sad note I'm also too caffeinated to end on a sad note so instead I land on a cute and happy one which is companions now if you're familiar they are cute little characters that congregate players can achieve when they earn the badge of the day companions came into the picture when players had been voicing a disconnect between earning the daily badges and some kind of long-term goal after companions were released the percentage of monthly average users did see a very slight decline however the average badges that were being earned increased this means that even though a bit less users were earning them the badges became more meaningful to the players who were pursuing them and thus ends our adventure a lot of lessons were learned today and only a few of them ended in tears as you leave this video undoubtedly a completely transformed individual I leave you with a few points to summarize MVPs are about who is using your product it's only gonna be as good as much as

you understand your customers needs so if you don't understand your customer your MVP won't have very much V if you know what I mean do not iterate for the sake of iteration iteration should only be towards further value to your users not just for funsies remember that development meetings planning it all costs money everything costs money everything costs money feedback is a double-edged sword well it's critical to growth it has a mind of its own but finding avenues for you to control the feedback you receive will help you wield that sword more wisely say no more than you say yes this is a very difficult muscle to build but having a strong product vision and sticking with your MVP and not chasing shiny things will help you build that habit lastly I would like to give a shout out to the folks who helped me make this talk I know you just see my slides and my face but a lot of people actually helped me and the talk get to where it is today which is on a video hopefully playing on Twitch but I don't

know we'll see so my deepest appreciation goes to everyone on this list for all of the help that they gave me usually at this point of the talk I was doing it in person I would say any questions and some people might have questions but since this is a video and we can't do that the most I can do is give you my Twitter which is that it's at little dov'è you can talk to me if you want or just send me a plant photo cuz I like plants please do not be mean to me I will cry thank you so much for watching my talk today I have to tell you it is so weird staring at a camera and not actually talking to a real human being because the camera just has this one void of an eye that stares at you with no facial expressions you'll never truly replace a human but yet thank you anyway and of course remember to be excellent to each other