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 can safely wait.
Hello, developers! 🚀
Welcome back to the Learn Agile Practices newsletter, your weekly dose of insights to power up your software development journey through Agile Technical Practices and Methodologies!
🔎 Scenario / Pain Point
Every MVP discussion starts with the same tension: everything feels essential. The designer argues for polished onboarding, sales insists on dashboards, and marketing demands push notifications. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking.
The truth is, building an MVP is not about validating the idea — it’s about validating the solution. You already know the problem you want to solve; now you need to prove that your chosen approach is viable. That means being crystal clear on three things from day one:
What problem are we solving? If this is fuzzy, no feature prioritization will save you.
Which technology can we deliver with speed and confidence? MVP timelines are 30–60 days max — you can’t afford to learn everything from scratch.
Where do we need spikes? If you must touch a new tech, isolate it in small experiments before it contaminates the whole product.
And there’s the budget: an MVP must be cheap enough to fail fast, but solid enough to serve as a foundation. If you cut corners blindly, you’ll end up rewriting from scratch. If you over-engineer, you’ll never ship.
This constant push-and-pull — speed vs. quality, cheap vs. sustainable, minimum vs. lovable — is the real pain point. Without clear criteria, you’ll waste weeks debating and still end up with a bloated backlog that delays the one thing an MVP must deliver: evidence that your solution works.
⚡ Why it matters
Defining an MVP is never just a design exercise — it’s about making deliberate trade-offs that keep you moving fast without sabotaging the future. If you don’t set the right boundaries early, the “minimum” in MVP quickly turns into “months of building” instead of “weeks of learning.”
One of the most underrated moves is researching and spiking on technologies that can accelerate delivery. A half-day spike on a new framework, hosting service, or integration can save you weeks later, either by cutting implementation time or allowing you to fit more scope into the same 30–60 day window. Skipping this step means committing blind to tech choices that may slow you down at the worst moment.
Equally critical is having a prioritized list of MVP features. Why? Because deadlines rarely move. If time beats scope — and it usually does — you want the essentials implemented first. Without clear priority, you risk spending your first two weeks on secondary features, only to realize the core problem is still unsolved by launch day.
It also helps to maintain a separate list of excluded features. You don’t need to treat it as gospel, but it serves as a reference point: when stakeholders ask, “Why isn’t this included?” you can show the trade-offs explicitly rather than debating from memory.
And finally, remember that even features inside the MVP must be “MVP versions” of themselves. Don’t build the perfect onboarding flow — build the simplest version that allows a user to start. Don’t architect the reporting system of your dreams — show a CSV export first. Every extra layer of polish you add delays the one thing an MVP must deliver: a working validation of your solution.
In short: research to accelerate, prioritize to focus, and simplify to ship. Miss any of these, and your MVP becomes just another unfinished v1.
🛠️ How we solve it
Solving the MVP dilemma isn’t about intuition or luck — it’s about applying a disciplined approach to narrowing down scope until only the essentials remain. Here are practices that consistently help:
1. Define the primary problem.
Every MVP starts with a clear hypothesis: “If we solve this problem, users will adopt our solution.” Without that north star, scope decisions are random. Before writing code, align the team on the single problem you’re validating.
2. Identify the core feature.
Most products can be boiled down to one or two functionalities without which users won’t feel any value. These are your non-negotiables. Everything else is optional. If you’re debating between 10 “must-haves,” you don’t have clarity — refine the list until only the features that directly validate your problem remain.
3. Classify the rest: must-have vs. nice-to-have.
Be ruthless: all nice-to-haves stay out of the MVP. If you still end up with more than 5–6 must-haves, you’ve lost focus. Tie each candidate feature back to the core problem. Example: everyone assumes login is mandatory. But is it? For early stages, you can piggyback on packaged auth (Laravel’s built-in auth, Firebase, Supabase) instead of building your own system. Low-code/no-code tools are invaluable here — they buy you weeks of development time.
4. Fake it till you make it.
If a feature isn’t critical but stakeholders want to see it, simulate it. A support system can start as a simple email address. An automated workflow can start as a Google Sheet updated manually. These shortcuts validate demand without sinking dev time. Again, no-code platforms are excellent enablers for this stage.
5. Apply the MVP principle inside features.
Even must-haves can be scoped down. If you need a search function, start with keyword filtering before building advanced full-text search with ranking. If you need analytics, start with one chart, not a full dashboard. An MVP within the MVP ensures you’re always testing the smallest useful slice.
6. Document the scope.
Write down what’s in and what’s out — and why. This isn’t bureaucracy; it’s protection against endless debates. Having a visible “in/out” list makes it clear to the team and stakeholders where the line is drawn, and prevents scope creep disguised as “small changes.”
In practice, these steps won’t silence every disagreement. But they create a common framework for making decisions quickly, keeping the team aligned, and ensuring the MVP remains what it’s supposed to be: the smallest possible product that proves your solution works.
🚀 Next Steps (tomorrow morning)
If you had to start defining your MVP tomorrow, here’s a practical checklist to keep yourself honest:
Write down the core problem in one sentence.
Strip away everything else. If you can’t summarize the hypothesis you’re validating in a single line, your MVP is already in danger of drifting.
Draft two lists: IN and OUT.
IN: the 1–2 features that directly validate your problem.
OUT: everything else. You can revisit later, but for now it’s a clear boundary.
Scope down each “IN” feature to its simplest useful version.
Ask yourself: What’s the smallest implementation that still lets a user experience value? Example: if you need reporting, start with a single export instead of a full analytics dashboard.
Do this exercise in less than an hour with your team or co-founder. The goal isn’t perfection — it’s clarity and alignment.
📎 Primary Resources
Henrik Kniberg — “Making Sense of MVP” (Crisp Blog)
A timeless piece on the difference between a prototype, an MVP, and a full product.
The original reference on MVP thinking, with focus on Build-Measure-Learn loops.
What’s the hardest feature you’ve ever had to cut from an MVP — and why?
Reply to this email and share your story. I’d love to collect real-world cases to feature in future issues.