Practical Handbook for Product Developers – First Steps: Idea, Validation, MVP – Best Practices for Defining and Planning an MVP

A practical summary of everything we covered in the “First Steps” section — the principles, mindsets, and techniques that help teams build an MVP that…

Dec 2 • Dan the dev

November 2025

Practical Handbook for Product Developers – First Steps: Idea, Validation, MVP – Keeping MVP Scope Alive While Building

An MVP scope isn’t a frozen document — it’s a living system. Here’s how to keep it healthy through daily decisions, evolving priorities, and real-time…

Nov 25 • Dan the dev

Practical Handbook for Product Developers – First Steps: Idea, Validation, MVP – Managing Internal Expectations

Clear internal communication is not a courtesy — it’s an essential ingredient for shipping fast, staying aligned, and protecting your MVP from…

Nov 18 • Dan the dev

Practical Handbook for Product Developers – First Steps: Idea, Validation, MVP – implementing Core vs Nice-to-Have Features

What distinguishes a core feature from a nice-to-have — and how your tech and delivery choices should shift accordingly.

Nov 11 • Dan the dev

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Practical Handbook for Product Developers – First Steps: Idea, Validation, MVP – Prioritizing Features with Stakeholders

Prioritisation isn’t about “least effort”; it’s about highest impact. Here’s why impact-led planning defines a sharp MVP scope — and how to lead…

Nov 4 • Dan the dev

October 2025

Practical Handbook for Product Developers – First Steps: Idea, Validation, MVP – Validating the problem/opportunity or the solution?

Are you still in the problem space or you already are in the solution space for your product? Here’s how structuring your discovery can reduce waste and…

Oct 28 • Dan the dev

Practical Handbook for Product Developers – First Steps: Idea, Validation, MVP – Fake it ‘till You make it

An MVP isn’t about building less — it’s about learning fast by making users believe the value exists before fully automating it.

Oct 21 • Dan the dev

Practical Handbook for Product Developers – First Steps: Idea, Validation, MVP – Simple Solutions First

The goal of an MVP isn’t completeness. It’s to learn if your solution works for the problem you’ve identified. Every feature should be simplest thing…

Oct 14 • Dan the dev

Practical Handbook for Product Developers – First Steps: Idea, Validation, MVP – How to Decide What Goes In and What Stays Out of the MVP?

An MVP isn’t about building less, but building only what proves your solution works. Learn how to decide which features are truly essential — and which…

Oct 7 • Dan the dev

June 2025

TDD When You Don’t Know What to Build

How do you test what hasn’t been built… when you don’t even know what you're building? What if the only thing we know is the problem, not the solution?

Jun 24

Leverage Communities to Spread Better Practices

Communities (meetups, Slack groups, conferences, internal guilds, blog posts, newsletters) are where practices propagate. Not by mandate or theory, but…

Jun 17

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XP Practices, Not AI, Drive the Real Gains

AI coding assistants are everywhere now—but it doesn't look like the biggest productivity boost many teams are seeing is from AI—it's something else…

Jun 10