It depends! But in many cases, I see the agile method was not the best option in the market!

Especially when you launch a digital product/ service in a mature market with many well-established competitors, going agile and launching your MVP to get user insights may take you nowhere, as these insights can be misleading.

Why?

MVPs could harm many sectors, like banks, telecoms, marketplaces, shipping, and e-commerce. All these businesses have been there for a long time, and they have a lot of solid references and studies, so when you are going to the market with fewer features than the others, especially with incomplete features or user journeys, you will kill the real business opportunity for a digital product. I’m not talking about one new feature you invented and want to test in the market; I’m talking about the product itself.

For example, you can’t go into the app for banking with three or four features; even if they are new features or new experiences, you have to start from where others have stopped and then add these new features using the agile methods.

And here, I have to differentiate between the internal process of working on the product and what you release to users to interact with.

Internally you can use whatever method you like, and your team is comfortable with, like planning for 2-week sprints and testing them as part of the development cycle. The issue is not to go live from the very first sprint, where you are just covering the basic functionality and features, with maybe a new experience or feature you are excited about. The reason is simply that users expect a full-fledged service with a mature offering as a benchmark with competitors’ offerings.

It’s good for your team to work on iterations -internally- to get more visibility and do quick enhancements based on internal testing, which goes in all product phases (Research, design, development). All these steps have a significant dependency, so you always have to reflect on all your testing outputs on these steps accordingly.

This question triggers memories I had with the UX case study developed earlier this month; I started doing and thinking about how people can manage their finance, So I ended up doing a full utility app for banks, including all the known feature lists, from transferring money, managing accounts, profiles, history transactions, and online others services and above of that I proposed the new features including the budgeting and expenses analysis that empowers my feature along with experience enhancement.

Finally, as UX designer/ product manager/ always steer your concerns about your recipient, which, in our case, your users, not about the limitations or challenges that may occur behind the scene — as users don’t care and can’t wait for months until your MVP reaches what they aspire for!