Managing Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in JIRA

unknown

In the intention from The Lean Startup, a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a version of a  product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort. In my company MVP concept was strictly built in a hierarchy:  Investments>Opportunities>MVPs>Stories. Different teams started to use different Jira functionalities for managing MVPs. As stories can be grouped to Epics in JIRA, some teams started to treat Epics as MVPs and some teams started to use Versions instead (versions also used for releases). Some teams uses Epics based on Scrum methodology and for them it's an obstacle to use Epics for MVPs tracking, so they ask for additional level in the JIRA issue hierarchy: Investments>Opportunities>MVPs>Epics>Stories. I think we should agree on a common way but hard to decide which way of  managing MVPs would be most effective. Please could you share your experience?

Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist]

You can take a look at JIRA Protfolio to introduce the hierarchy you are talking about.

Investments>Opportunities>MVPs>Epics>Stories

I am not sure what will work best for you as it depends a lot on the process you follow. We do something similar to the above using Portfolio for a few customers. If you do not have Portfolio, you might have to work with the constraints of JIRA Software, by leveraging Epics for MVPs or high level features in the MVP.

I am not a fan of limiting Epics for MVPs but you have to find a way to track them by adding Epics under the so-called Epics.