You know that having a great user experience is crucial for users to adopt your new product – but so is being first-to-market, and time is running out. What do you do?

Product leaders face this question everyday.

Around 10 years ago, during the time I somewhat affectionately call the “app store gold rush,” I often used to work with clients who had brilliant ideas for new products. Unfortunately, many of them suffered from the same syndrome – wanting to overload their apps with so many features that it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to bring them to the market in a timely fashion. Even worse, most of these functions were completely extraneous from the actual core purpose of the app, but were viewed in the eyes of the product creator as absolutely essential for their product, even though the creator hadn’t done any user research to back up these views.

Each time this common scenario would play out, I would ask each client the very same question: What is the one or two things your product is going to do better than any other product on the market today?

If you can identify the “killer feature(s)” you need to bring to the market first, you’ll save valuable budget and more importantly, you’ll reduce your product’s time-to-market. After you pinpoint the one or two essential features, you now have the feature list of your own MVP. Now it’s time to find the perfect design team, and get the ball rolling on launching your product.

A solid MVP should contain just enough to scratch the biggest itch. Once you’ve launched, user feedback will guide your strategy. Users will often surprise you with feedback about what they think is most important.

Forget about building in all the features Facebook has currently. It simply isn’t needed. Furthermore, remember that Facebook didn’t launch in its current state. It launched with a stripped down feature set that grew to the current implementation over two decades and through billions of dollars in revenue. During that time, designers tested, gathered feedback from users, refined features to user’s needs, and finally set them free in the world. Even with the most dedicated design team, it would be impossible to launch that 2-decades-in version in your initial launch.

Give your users what they want – the one or two features that set your product apart, and great design to match. By building in this way you’ll ensure that you have your finger on the pulse of what your users will want moving forward with new feature additions. You’ll also be able to grow your features “organically” from their direct feedback, so you can avoid the pitfalls of creating features you / the CEO / any other important person on the product team thinks is really cool, but that no one is asking for inside your user base.

So, congrats on your new product idea! I hope it changes the world. Just remember, you have all the time in the world to add nice-to haves after your MVP is out there. But keep the first version simple, but powerful and well-designed.

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