Ahoy, PageKid visitor! This is the second chapter of the PageKid chronicles. Today, we're diving into the intriguing world of MVPs, or Minimum Viable Products and KPIs ((Key Performance Indicators).
Now, what exactly is an MVP, you may wonder? Well, think of it as the bare skeleton of your grand idea. Your end result, but stripped down to its bare bones. It's the simplest version of your product that still delivers value to your users.
That might sound easy, but let me tell you, achieving that sweet spot of simplicity and functionality is not that easy. Here’s what we did: we set up a series of 30 minute daily meetings, and in each meeting we discussed one aspect of the MVP. Why did we choose this intermittent process? We wanted to have our judgmental faculties kick in on our own ideas from one day to another.
And it worked, since it was on day three that we realised in a crystal clear fashion what our one single most important idea was. It was “time-to-publish”.
We define Time-to-publish (TTP) as the amount of time measured from the moment a user logged on to pagekid until his page was published and viewable online. It’s really quite simple when you think about it.
What do you do with your centric idea? You set it as your main KPI and let it guide you in making all sorts of choices and decisions.
Choosing the right KPI is crucial for getting things right. Some businesses set different KPIs such as revenues, or daily active users, new subscribers etc. Now these are all legitimate KPIs, but in our opinion pure metrics like these end up defocusing your business. Instead we believe a great main KPI should be something inherently important to the customer experience and value added from the service or product.
I’ll give you two great examples of value based KPIs: 1) a famous newsletter company advertised that their chose KPI was never the number of subscribers, but instead they went with “open rate” of their newsletter, realising that this is what hey have to be minded most about, and that total viewership and virality of their service all hinges on that one metric. 2) A second great example is that of a leading search engine whose name rhymes with frugal had the metric “relevancy” as their main KPI rather than “number of daily searches”. Again, the logic is that you should optimise for what creates better value for your customers, and every other KPI, financial or operational, will follow suit. Of course you can have more than one KPI. Just make sure that the KPIs you opted for do not contradict one another and that both align with the company’s long term vision.
With TTP as our main KPI we were well on our way to creating the UX flow necessary to create our ultra fast page builder.
Next post: “Friction”.
Previous post: "Origin Story"
To be continued...