Lopes is the biggest real estate company in Brazil, where I’m leading the digital transformation efforts. A new hire who came from an e-commerce site mentioned that app push notifications generated more leads and had greater conversion rates than SMS and email marketing. We got interested in testing this hypothesis, but always with the MVD – Minimum Viable Discovery mindset that I explained earlier.

How could we test this hypothesis as fast and cheaply as possible? Building an entire native app with all the features of our existing website would take months. Even if we scoped it down a lot, with the minimum to deliver some value to the user, it still would take many weeks.

Since our website is responsive, we devise a simple solution to test the hypothesis. We decided to create a webview app, a simpler solution than building a native app, eve if we scoped it to a minimum.

By the way, this is how Facebook and Linkedin launched their first mobile apps as well. Only when they the results generated by a mobile app, and proved that a native version would bring even more results, they decided to invest in building their native apps.

Here’s Lopes’ mobile app:

With this mobile app we were able to confirm that push notification generated more leads and had greater conversion rates than SMS and email marketing. We launched this app in early 2021.

I already heard that MVP doesn’t scale, it is just to test a solution hypothesis and then, if the solution hypothesis, we should work on delivering the solution in a scalable manner. As with everything related to product management, it depends! In our case, untill now we haven’t had the need to build a native version of this mobile app. The webview version is working quite fine for our needs and users seem to be ok with it as well. Maybe in the future we’ll have the need to build a native app but, at least for now, after more than one year that we launched our webview mobile app, there’s still no need to build the native mobile app.

You cantry Lopes App for Android or iOS.

Summing up

• MVD – Minimal Viable Discovery mindset is essential to deliver results as fast as possible. For instance, why building a native mobile app to test some hypothesis if a webview is enough to test it?

• The “MVP doesn’t scale” affirmation is not necessarily true. As everything related to product management, it depends. In our case, after more than a year after launching the MVP we created to test our Discovery Solution hypothesis, our webview app, we haven’t had the need to build a native app.

Mentoring and advice on digital product development

I’ve been helping several companies extract more value and results from their digital products. Check here how I can help you and your company.

Digital Product Management Books

Do you work with digital products? Do you want to know more about how to manage a digital product to increase its chances of success, solve its user’s problems and achieve the company objectives? Check out my Digital Product Management bundle with my 3 books where I share what I learned during my 30+ years of experience in creating and managing digital products:

• Startup Guide: How startups and established companies can create profitable digital products
• Product Management: How to increase the chances of success of your digital product
• Leading Product Development: The art and science of managing product teams

You can also acquire the books individually, by clicking on their titles above.