A short guide to scoping an MVP

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. Everything we would tell a client about scoping an MVP in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

Why this earns attention

Minimum means uncomfortable, viable means it works. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

How to approach it

Cut features, not quality. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

Warning signs

The point is to learn something specific. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

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
• 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

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.