What to ask your agency about scoping an MVP

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on scoping an MVP, these questions are worth asking early.

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Minimum means uncomfortable, viable means it works. 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.

The point is to learn something specific. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

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
• 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

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.