This is NOT that MVP Session

This session, This Is Not That MVP Session, bears a somewhat unique title, as I wanted to talk about the Technical Founder viewpoint.

The idea is to inspire from the experience of working with our customers and to extract lessons learned as well as things I would try and tell myself if I was starting this process from scratch, things I would try and prioritize if I was to go build a new venture tomorrow.

Transcript

1. © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This Is Not That MVP Session Nicolas David (He/Him) Senior Solutions Architect, Startups Saubia Khan (She/Her) Solutions Architect, Startups
2. “The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage.” Cindy Alvarez Lean Customer Development
3. Nicolas David Senior Solutions Architect, Startups Manama, Bahrain @nuage_ninja in/nicolasdavid Nicolas works hand in hand with technical co- founders, engineers and developers to help them make the most of the Cloud. He is at the crossroads of business and technology and engages with organizations at all stages of cloud adoption. Nicolas also takes a leading role in creating and presenting technical content and best practices.
4. Saubia Khan Solutions Architect, Startups Dubai, UAE in/saubia Saubia resides in the sunny city of Dubai and is a Startup Solutions Architect at AWS for the last 3 years. She passionately works with emerging startups in MENA & Turkey where she onboards and accelerates startups in the region with a focus on AI. Throughout her career she has focused on building innovative accessibility solutions with AI and has worked with AI startups where she helps them navigate the ever changing AI landscape.
5. • Building an MVP from the perspective of a technical founder • Personal experience and retrospective • Lessons learned from working with hundreds of early stage startups • What I would want to know starting fresh today • What to prioritize and what can be deferred • Tactical examples and first steps to get you started Our Focus Today
6. 1. What is an MVP? 2. Before You Build 3. Leverage Frameworks 4. Flexible Architecture 5. Building Guardrails, Not Gates 6. Surviving the Unexpected 7. Understanding Your Users 8. Integrating Offline Tasks Agenda
7. What Is An MVP?
8. Minimum {X} Product Viable Usable Loveable Testable
9. ”Left to Right” vs “Bottom to Top” Functionality Reliability Usability UX & Design
10. “If you aren't embarrassed by the first version of your product, you shipped too late.” Reid Hoffman Co-Founder LinkedIn
11. Product Iteration
12. Optimize For Learning Learn Prototype Experiment
13. The Learn-Build-Learn Cycle Learn Build
14. Where are you in your MVP journey today?
15. Before You Build
16. Are You Ready To Build an MVP? Problem Definition A clear understanding of the problem you are solving will ease communication of your idea with both stakeholders and users. Problem Metrics The number of people that have this problem, and the impact of the problem to those users. Solution Hypothesis Initial hypothesis of how the problem will be solved for your users.
17. • Process not product • Speed is paramount • Set the right focus (10-100 customers) • Customer feedback is critical • Expect to change/pivot/adapt • Weigh technical debt vs other kinds of debt MVP Is a State of Mind
18. • Focus on building and validating the strongest use case first • In most cases any building should take < 3 person months • Distinguish between being busy and creating value • Minimize friction wherever possible for your users MVP Feature Prioritization & Scope
19. “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Airman's Odyssey
20. Leverage Frameworks
21. Ask yourself some important questions: • What are you building? • What are you optimizing for? • What are your existing skill sets? What skill sets are available to you in the market? What Architecture Is Right For Me?
22. • The monolith is a viable option • Leverage frameworks to increase your speed and confidence • Very little of what you build in your MVP will be recognizable a year later • Whatever you choose: leverage infrastructure as code! What Architecture Is Right For Me?
23. The Code Continuum Consider where no code, and low code solutions fit in Abstraction vs flexibility tradeoffs
24. AWS Amplify is a set of tools and services that can be used together or on their own, to help front-end web and mobile developers build scalable full stack applications, powered by AWS. • Configure and deploy backends quickly • Seamlessly connect frontends • Streamlined deployment of frontends • Easily manage your users and content AWS Amplify
25. AWS Copilot is a command line interface (CLI) that enables customers to quickly launch and easily manage containerized applications on AWS. • Architecture, not infrastructure • Simple and powerful config • Develop/Release/Operate AWS Copilot
26. The AWS Solutions Library offers a collection of cloud-based solutions for dozens of technical and business problems, vetted for you by AWS. • Automatically deploys directly into your AWS account • Library of AWS-vetted architecture diagrams AWS Solutions Library
27. The AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) is an open source software development framework to define your cloud application resources using familiar programming languages. • Easier cloud onboarding • Faster development process • Customizable and shareable • No context switching AWS Cloud Development Kit
28. AWS Solutions Constructs are vetted architecture patterns, available as an open-source extension of the AWS Cloud Development Kit, that can be easily assembled to create a production-ready workload. • Infrastructure-as-code • Pre-built, well-architected multi-service patterns • Combine to create your own solutions • Speed up your development cycle • Consistently deliver Well-Architected apps AWS Solutions Constructs
29. CodeWhisperer is trained on billions of lines of code and can generate code suggestions ranging from snippets to full functions in real time based on your comments and existing code. Bypass time-consuming coding tasks and accelerate building with unfamiliar APIs. • Focus on innovation and business-critical problems • Accelerate time-consuming development tasks & time to market • Quickly adopt new technologies to build complex solutions • Adopt AWS services more easily and with confidence • Improve application security AWS CodeWhisperer
30. AWS Marketplace makes buying software easy, it is transforming how customers worldwide find, subscribe to, deploy, and govern third-party software, data, containers, ML models, and professional services • Software and data you know, love, and trust • Broad selection for app portfolio modernization • Enhance governance and control • Incorporate professional support and expertise • Help optimize IT spend AWS Marketplace
31. AWS Marketplace makes selling software easy, you manage your product listings with minimal time and effort, gain insights on your cloud business, create and target offers to specific customer accounts along with Standard or Enterprise contracts. • Got to market faster • Sell the way your customers want to buy • Grow your customer base • Improve efficiency and profitability • Easy and secure deployment, almost instantly • Consolidated billing from AWS Sell on AWS Marketplace
32. For those of you that are building today, what frameworks are you using, if any?
33. Flexible Architecture
34. Technology/Architecture Philosophy • Avoid “undifferentiated heavy lifting” at the beginning • Resist the temptation to add complexity unnecessarily • Don’t introduce endogenous churn • De-risk by transferring that risk to your provider • Don’t be intimidated by the unknown
35. Prioritize Managed Services • Choose the highest level of abstraction available to you that gets the job done • You can always choose to de-abstract down the road, the reverse is much harder • Non-functional requirements are baked in to managed services • Operations burden is significantly reduced • Security risks are significantly (but not completely) reduced
36. Minimize Throwaway Work • Minimize, but don’t expect to eliminate re-work • PMF can be described as a point where your product is breaking under growth • Let your user feedback and desired outcomes drive changes, not technical debt • The iterative learning cycle can mean evolution over revolution
37. Make Reversible Decisions Quickly • At Amazon we call these decisions “two way doors” • What is the cost/difficulty of reversing the decision? • How do I measure the outcome? • How do revert the decision? • Be prepared to be wrong a lot initially
38. Externalize State • Separating state from logic gives you optionality, scaling, and flexibility • It also introduces new challenges and risks you need to manage
39. Externalize Authentication User management is the pinnacle of “undifferentiated heavy lifting” One of the highest risk components in the architecture Payments is another prime example of this
40. What level of abstraction are you currently or planning to build with for your MVP?
41. Building Guardrails
42. Build Guardrails, Not Gates • Includes but not limited to both security and operations • Teams should spend time solving problems that move the business ahead • Experimentation should be encouraged • Seeing the results of a change should be immediate • Time spent firefighting, waiting on people or processes, or doing rework is waste • Hiring talent is hard enough
43. Onboarding • As you grow your team the ease and safety of onboarding new developers is critical • You will have varying levels of trust • A single source of truth for identity will make your life much easier • Start documenting expected standards and processes early
44. Onboarding Consider the differences in: the ability to push code access production systems access production data
45. CI/CD • Leverage the benefits of small, fast units of deployment • If you aren’t shipping those updates, you are missing the primary benefit • Working on an MVP without CI/CD is like trying to “roll a cube” • How much CI/CD is right initially? • Does anyone really write tests?
46. Observability • Observability is what brings confidence to move quickly • How do you know the impact of your changes? • When do you need to rollback quickly? • Key components: • Metrics • Logging • Tracing
47. Synthetics • You want to find issues before your customers/users do • Continually verify your customer experience (even when you don’t have any customer traffic)
48. What level of confidence do you have in quickly making changes to your application today?
49. Surviving The Unexpected
50. • It’s easy to get tunnel vision when focused on the product • There are important ways to minimize existential risk in your environment • Don’t wait until the loss would be catastrophic • Minimize, not eliminate Every Once In Awhile, Look Up
51. • Managed services help guard against failure • They don’t protect you from accidents, errors, and malice • Centralize and automate data protection • Covers storage volumes, databases, and filesystems • Validate and test the process before you need it Managed Backups
52. • Ensuring you have visibility into your costs is critical to planning process • Understanding your costs helps you reason about feature viability • Unexpected spikes are indicators of a problem that you want to be aware of quickly • Track your AWS credit usage • Use budget alarms Cost Visibility
53. How confident are you in understanding your cloud costs, and avoiding unexpected surprises?
54. Understanding Your Users
55. • Learning what resonates with your users is a core purpose of your MVP • Determine how users are actually using your MVP • The only users that have value are active users • User metrics are different than operational metrics • Investors will expect you to be an expert on your users and their experience with your solution Validated Learning Drives MVP Iteration
56. • What are unexpected high use features? • Where do you see unexpected drop off/abandonment? • How do you need to update your hypothesis? • If you can log it, you can build metrics around it. Measuring User Activity
57. Integrating Offline Tasks
58. • Your MVP make look different to your users than from the inside • Manual processes are normal and to be expected • You can still track them to ensure good customer experience • Lay the groundwork for future automation Fake It Until You Make It
59. • You can leverage workflow co-ordination between systems • You can loop in humans with yes/no decisions via email • Applies to any back office process Tracking Manual Work with Step Functions
60. Key Takeaways
61. Speed Forgo perfection and make progress. “Move fast and make things!" Learning Every day should generate new questions, based on yesterday’s activity. Risk Reduction Have awareness of, and externalize or mitigate risk where possible.
62. “Make something people want.” Paul Graham YC
63. Please complete session survey !
64. Thank you © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Saubia Khan Solutions Architect, Startups in/saubia Nicolas David Senior Solutions Architect, Startups @nuage_ninja in/nicolasdavid