Scoping an MVP: what to get right first

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. If you only fix one thing about scoping an MVP this quarter, make it the first item below.

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

Start here

Minimum means uncomfortable, viable means it works. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

Then this

Cut features, not quality. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Eventually

The point is to learn something specific. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

How to tell if yours is fine

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
• The point is to learn something specific — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.