MVP, MMP, OMG - When Do I Launch?

Many ecommerce leaders are trying to figure out when it’s best to launch a new website or a new major feature on their site. Everyone varies based on their risk tolerance and business requirements, but today we’re going to talk about key points to consider when planning a project, scheduling a launch or especially building a team culture around launching.

When we say when’s best to launch - we’re not talking about when to launch a new marketing campaign or even the best time of year to launch a new feature. We’re talking about when in a project’s lifecycle it’s best to launch - how much polish you should apply before making your newest site improvement live to your customers. 

MVPs

Companies like Netflix, Facebook and Amazon have focused on MVPs - releasing minimum viable products as fast as possible; Netflix is known for deploying up to 4000 changes per day. Often these are changes so small that users don’t notice any individual change - it’s the combination of multiple changes that results in a change in the user experience.

MMPs

A slightly newer term is MMP - minimum marketable product. This makes a distinction between the smallest change you can launch and the smallest change that will make a difference in your sales, basically. With an MMP, you break your project down into the smallest changes you can deploy that customers will notice and that you expect to make a change in conversion rate, average order value or similar metrics.

OMG

You can consider these ideas of launching fast and early on a spectrum where on one extreme end you have Netflix deploying 4000 changes daily and on the extreme other end you have a company that may decide only to deploy after everything is polished, perfect, triple checked and as a result may only deploy changes once a year, or might take even longer. 

Launch Early, Launch Often

So, where should you fall on the spectrum between MVP, MMP and OMG? It depends, but in general experience shows launching early and often tends to outperform a more conservative approach.  

Real User Data is Worth Its Weight in Gold

Whether you’re planning a new website or a new feature for your existing website, your plans typically are based on one or more theories you’ve created about the customer experience that will deliver the best results. Even if you’ve interviewed users or conducted other usability tests on your existing site or your proposed new site or feature, these are still just theories - you won’t know how your customers will respond in full until the new site or feature is launched. Launching smaller pieces earlier allows you to gather data to test your theories and apply what you learn to the next iteration of your site or feature that you are working on.

The longer you go without launching, the better the chance that you’ll miss on customer expectations - waiting until everything is polished and perfect very well could result in your customer expectations having changed in that time. Technology moves fast, and if you’re not launching updates at a fast pace, you can quickly be left behind.

Impact of Failure versus Impact of Inaction

Many businesses overestimate the impact or risk of launching earlier or faster - they assume that if they don’t launch a perfect site or feature, their customers will go elsewhere. In our experience, this fear is often overestimated. Ecommerce websites aren’t buildings - they’re not something you build once and need to get exactly right the first time. Websites are constantly evolving pieces of technology. If you launch an MVP or MMP and it doesn’t go well - great, that gives you more data from your customers to help you adjust and adapt your next launch to better meet their expectations.

Customers notice which companies are improving and updating the customer experience over time and those that aren’t. The risk of customers going elsewhere while you work to make a new site or feature perfect before launching it is often much greater than the risk of launching a site or feature without perfect polish on it.

Cost of Technical Debt

When you’re building a new site or a new feature, you’re paying developers for their time - whether it’s an in-house team or a partner team that you’re working with. Many people assume that the costs involved on a project will increase in a linear fashion over time - each month costs roughly the same as the month before. That’s not the case - projects can hit a tipping point where costs begin to increase exponentially over time. It varies by company and industry, but typically once a project takes more than 12 months, you’ll see increased costs due to changes in technology, changes in customer expectations, software updates and even the technical debt that can build up by having so many different changes, branches and features in one project. The more often you launch and the smaller pieces of functionality you launch, the lower your total cost will often be.

Build a Culture of Hypothesis, Launch, Test, Repeat

With a culture focused on data-driven experiments, you can make many small changes over time that each add a percentage point or two to your revenue. Stacking many of those changes over a quarter or a year delivers more value, faster, than trying to make one big change once a year.  

Our recommendation is that teams build a culture of launching and deploying often. Develop a hypothesis of what will help your reach your business goals based on current customer expectations, build a site or feature to test that hypothesis and launch it as quickly as possible. After launching, look at your data to see if your hypothesis was correct or not and then begin the cycle again. That’s the path to many successful ecommerce launches.