Scoping an MVP, explained without the jargon

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. Here is scoping an MVP without the vocabulary that usually surrounds it.

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

The short version

Minimum means uncomfortable, viable means it works. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

Why people complicate it

Most of the confusion comes from tooling rather than from the idea itself. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding.

Cut features, not quality. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Turning this into a decision

The point is to learn something specific. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

The short version

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
• Cut features, not quality — 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.