3 Steps to Creating a Minimum Viable Launch

You’re likely familiar with the concept of MVP — Minimum Viable Product. When done properly, it’s an incredible way of getting real world feedback, and rapidly iterating and improving a product. Unfortunately people often forget about the “viable” part of the acronym.

This leaves customer success leaders, like me, who need to help businesses use our product, with an incredibly hard job; gaps in features, challenging UIs designed by engineers, infuriating but not fatal bugs all require work arounds. While no one issue kills the experience, they pile up like a horrible Jenga tower. No great software product avoids these issues, it’s inherent in powerful products being used in complicated real-world environments by diverse users.

When you are onboarding thousands of users, it’s important to build out a launch process that helps make a new user “viable” on the platform quickly so they don’t get frustrated, lose interest, slow down the process, or even worse, give up. The key here is getting them to see your products value quickly and motivating them to become power users.

This is where “Minimum Viable Launch” (MVL) comes in. It’s the SevenRooms way of minimizing “time to first value” and getting our customers operational quickly. It also means revenue is live quickly, something even our BoD can get excited about.

Word of caution as you continue reading. It’s imperative to remember that this is the minimum amount in order to launch — if a client stops at the MVL and expects success, they are bound to miss much the value your software can bring, and become a huge churn risk. Just like MVP is the very first iteration, MVL is a user launch tool, not the end-goal.

Step 1: Separate Onboarding from Customer Success Managers

The term “Minimum Viable” sounds like cutting corners though… right?

So how did we mitigate the churn risk that inherently exists when you let people cut corners and move quickly through an important onboarding process?

We created two teams with different goals, skills and training. Our Onboarding team is responsible for getting the client successfully live. They customize the software, build out the settings, train the end users, enable integrations, while keeping the client excited and engaged as the software goes live in the restaurants (a particularly complicated industry for new software — it needs to be right or the entire operation is put at risk for less than perfect guest experience).

It is then the CSM’s who hold the customers hand in the next phase of their journey with us through a thorough and calculated adoption program.

The first few check-ins in adoption are designed as a safeguard for the intentionally missed details throughout onboarding, given that we’ve optimized for speed to use early on. It is the responsibility of the CSM’s to continue to prove the value through engagement and usage, and work with clients on an individualized basis to get there. They are responsible for ensuring the client is taking full advantage of the features that will help drive their success.

Over anywhere from a few weeks to a few months, they move through the adoption check-ins and become eligible for the next phase once certain milestones are met. Often times, clients are not ready to use the full platform right away. They will ease them into use until they feel comfortable to fly. The customers time in the adoption phase is dependent on both their internal resources and tech curiosity.

Eventually, and in less of a rush, they are ready to move into the nurture phase. In this chapter, we are still having regular check-ins, and communicate through a variety of tools both individual and with scaled approaches through training, webinars, and product updates.

Step 2: Understand and set the client’s expectations of what success means throughout different phases

Setup a meeting between onboarding, customer success, sales and product that maps out ways that your customers could measure both success and how they are going to get there. Here are some questions to get you started:

• What features do the end users desperately want, and what are they expecting to have?
• What features save them the most time? The most money?
• What features, when used properly, wow the customer?
• What is the minimum we can do to provide maximum results when optimizing for speed?
• What is required in order for this to be operationally functioning for the user’s management team?
• What can I push to a later stage of the clients lifecycle that will have no impact on their sentiment or experience?

…this is not the end! You need sales and onboarding and CSM to connect with every single client to understand how they, individually, will measure success. Little insights about the customer, their environment or culture are immensely helpful in creating both a delightful experience and ensure you are reaching what success and happiness means for them. The idea that expectations minus reality is the gap that creates what happiness means. Expectations are critical to the MVL process.

Step 3: Identify your Minimum Viable Task list

Now that you’ve separated onboarding and customer success, understood what customers want to be successful, it’s time to remap your onboarding journey.

We mapped the end-to-end onboarding process, including all steps by sales, customers, product, engineering and customer success teams. It was quite a few unique tasks. We deconstructed it and extracted a subset of tactical and technical things that absolutely needed to be done before a client can be considered live and would find value.

We took the remaining action items and pushed that to the Customer Success Manager (CSM) to handle in adoption, and to continue their path to success.

End: We’ve used MVL successfully at SevenRooms for the last 3 years and helped thousands of users onboard successfully.

There is a moral to this story — people want instant gratification.

In order to grant that, you’ll need to get them live, fast. Time to first value is critical for their success, and MVL is absolutely the best way to get them there. That said, you are knowingly optimizing for speed, which means you need to take the time to build out a solid long term customer success journey and help them continue being successful. We have admittedly and proudly sacrificed quality for speed for the earliest of their journey, while solidifying a process that ensures our clients do not fall through the cracks.

Be extra vigilant about not falling into the trap so many product teams fall into for sacrificing quality over speed, and then running to the next shiny object or client around the corner. MVL is a great way to help your clients get to first value quickly, learn their business alongside them learning your platform, and enable and lead this client to success and happiness.

It’s one of the reasons that our software has incredible fans and world class retention.