Scoping an MVP: the questions we get asked most

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. The questions about scoping an MVP that come up most often on our calls.

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

Do we need to care about this?

Minimum means uncomfortable, viable means it works. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Can it wait until after launch?

Occasionally. More often the post-launch version costs several times the pre-launch one. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here.

How do we know it is working?

The point is to learn something specific. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

In practice

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. Three things worth confirming about scoping an MVP before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Minimum means uncomfortable, viable means it works — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.