Marketers are problem solvers at heart. At least that’s what I believe.
Too many marketers, however, are trying to over engineer every problem they encounter and every test they run. We’re of the mindset that the best solution is always the most complicated one. We believe that for a test to be effective, we must build the 100% solution.
The challenge with this approach is we often allocate our most precious resource – our time – to an unproven solution.
This is where minimum viable thinking can be very effective. It’s a problem solving framework that forces you to identify the simplest version of a solution that will give you the maximum amount of validated learning with the least effort. It’s a powerful time saving tool every marketer needs in their toolbox.
Let me show you how it works.
The Minimum Viable Product
In his book The Lean Startup, Eric Ries wrote:
“The big question of our time is not can it be built but should it be built.”
Eric Ries, The Lean Startup
The idea behind the minimum viable product (MVP) has been around for some time, but its importance still lives on.
In the startup world, the application of this idea is simple: how do you build the simplest version of your product that will allow you to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about your customers with the least effort (and resources).
The MVP is far from the 100% solution, but it’s perfectly sufficient for learning. The goal with the MVP is to determine whether your solution is on the right track and worth investing more time, effort, and resources into.
This is the basis of minimum viable thinking.
Minimum Viable Thinking for Marketers
As marketers, we want to apply the same concept to our work.
When you’re testing a hypothesis, use the framework of minimum viable thinking and ask yourself what a simple solution could be to allow you to get the learnings you need to prove or disprove your hypothesis.
The goal is to identify the simplest version of your solution – the minimum viable solution – that will allow you to extract the maximum amount of validated learning with the least effort.
Only once you’ve validated your hypothesis does it make sense to invest more time and resources into a better solution.
Let’s look at a very simple example:
You’ve got a great idea to show off your customer reviews on an important landing page. You hypothesize that by adding the reviews on the page, you will increase social proof and see a lift in the amount of people clicking through to the product page.
The 100% all-in solution could be embedding your review app onto your landing page and showing a dynamic real-time view of all your most up to date reviews and testimonials that users can scroll and sort through. Depending on the complexity, this would require at least a handful of hours of design and dev work.
With minimum viable thinking, the question becomes:
What is the simplest version of this solution that would allow me to extract the maximum amount of validated learning with the least effort?
The options could vary, but one version of a minimum viable solution could be to simply screen grab five of your favorite customer reviews and add them as images to your landing. This would take roughly 30 minutes at best and would still give you the learnings you need to validate whether your hypothesis holds.
If you prove your hypothesis to be true and you see a lift in CTR, then it’s worth considering building out the 100% solution. You may also find that the simpler version is sufficient for the long term.
If you don’t see a lift, then you saved yourself hours of development work and can easily remove the images.
This approach of building a minimum viable solution works for almost any initiative you want to tackle. It’s an exercise in creativity. The challenge is finding that right threshold where the minimum viable solution is just sufficient enough to validate your hypothesis. If the solution is too simple or clunky, you won’t extract accurate learnings. If the solution is too complex, you waste resources.
Marketers need to strive for that sweet spot.
Thinking in Phases
One of my favorite MVP methods is to think in phases.
It’s a process for breaking up large initiatives into multiple phases with the goal of minimizing the effort involved in the event of a reversal. If you’re thinking about making a large sweeping change but there’s a possibility that you’ll need to revert, consider making the changes in phases.
Let me give you an example we faced:
At Crossrope, we wanted to change our leading offer on our site from $ off to % off. We hypothesized that switching to % off would increase code utilization because a single code was easier to share and simpler for the customer to use (since one code applied to all products).
The challenge was we had our $ offer embedded on numerous marketing touchpoints – ads, popups, landing pages, email flows, etc – and it would have taken some time to update every single touchpoint. It also meant that had the test gone poorly and we needed to revert all the changes, we would have had to revert every single touchpoint.
Again, this is where minimum viable thinking comes into play. The question is, what are the minimum number of touchpoints we need to update to allow us to validate the $ > % change without compromising the shopping experience?
This is where thinking in phases works really well.
We took a look at all the touchpoints we would have to change and categorized them into two phases.
In phase one, we updated only the key touchpoints – our evergreen ads, primary popup, homepage, and welcome flow. Everything else we left as is (and kept our old discount codes live in case shoppers were coming across them).
Then we ran the test and assessed.
We were able to validate the test with the phase one changes alone and proceeded to the second phase where other touchpoints could be updated. Had the test gone bad and we needed to revert our changes, we would have only needed to revert the phase one changes.
This is the beauty of thinking in phases.
Putting It Into Action
Minimum Viable Thinking is a framework all marketers should adopt.
It’s a way to test new ideas and solutions with minimal amount of effort and resources. A focus on simplicity allows you to validate your ideas much more quickly and identify exactly where your time and effort should be allocated.
This is how you become a more effective and productive marketer.
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