Use of Pull Product Development for Enhancing Lean Startups

To succeed in product development starting from new product concepts is a challenging task. The lean startup methodology (LSM) enables on agile testing and learning cycle to validate hypotheses at the product idea/concept generation level when traditional stage-gate product development process is too resource consuming and is lacking speed to market. Lean startups are significantly challenged by subsequent financial and related other resource restrictions and subsequently it leads to minimal viable products (MVPs). An MVP provides minimum sufficient product features to satisfy early consumers in which provide feedback and revenue for future product development i.e. product market fit. When there are many previously developed MVPs in the market. It is not clear how to pull them to be the products with minimum viable product features (MVPFs) as the consumer demands rise over the time. This manuscript first briefly discusses current challenges in lean startups and concept of lean/pull product development. Then, it presents a framework to demonstrate pull product development process. Finally, with the support of a case study, it demonstrates how to use multi-criteria analysis methodology to recognize MVPFs. An illustrative analysis and results are presented to demonstrate the use of the suggested approach for recognizing MVPFs.