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.
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!
📚 Previous on this series
⏩ Section 1 - First steps: Idea, Validation, MVP
1️⃣ Chapter 1 – How to Decide What Goes In and What Stays Out of the MVP
2️⃣ Chapter 2 – Simple Solutions First
3️⃣ Chapter 3 – Fake it ‘till You make it
4️⃣ Chapter 4 – Validating the problem/opportunity or the solution?
5️⃣ Chapter 5 – Prioritizing Features (with Stakeholders)
6️⃣ Chapter 6 – Implementing core and nice to have features → You’re here.
7️⃣ Chapter 7 – Implementing core and nice to have features → Coming next week!
🧭 Follow the journey: each issue is a micro-chapter of the series: Practical Handbook for Product Developers — released weekly.
🔎 Scenario / Pain Point
When you’re launching an MVP, the feature wish-list grows fast: “Let’s add social login, analytics, multi-language, offline mode…” And while all these may look appealing, the real danger is that you bundle so many features that you lose sight of the MVP’s goal: validating the core value proposition.
Teams often treat all features as equal. They decide “Feature A = 3 days”, “Feature B = 4 days”, so why not do both? But if the “must-have” that actually solves the user’s main problem gets treated the same way as a “nice-to-have” decoration, you risk two things: First, you delay shipping something valuable. Second, you build complexity you’ll likely discard.
Technical teams also react differently depending on feature type. For core features, engineers may assume “we must do it perfectly”. For nice-to-haves, they may say “we’ll do a quick version, then fix”. The problem: quality trade-offs aren’t the same in both cases. A core feature with weak quality may undermine the product’s credibility; a nice-to-have with high quality wastes time and energy.
In startup mode, you often have only 30-60 days to deliver. The rest of the organisation moves fast. If your team tries to treat every feature as equal, you’ll slow down, scope will creep, and you’ll arrive at “MVP1” that looks like “v0.1 of full product” — and learn nothing. You need to clearly differentiate core vs nice-to-have before you design the system.
⚡ Why It Matters
Core features are the ones without which your product doesn’t deliver value. They are the reason a user chooses you. Nice-to-haves add polish, differentiate, delight — but they don’t make or break your MVP.
Because of this distinction:
The technical investment you’re willing to make changes. For core features you may accept higher engineering quality, better testing, even more robust architecture, because failure here means your product fails.
For nice-to-haves, you should treat them as optional or deferred. If you include them in the MVP, they should be minimal versions, with less testing, less polish — possibly even as manual or simulated features.
Treating all features equally means you allocate time and quality budget incorrectly. Many sources on MVPs emphasise avoiding feature-bloat and focusing on “must-have” elements.
Architecture must reflect this. Your system should prioritise the core features for reliability, simplicity, and scalability later; the nice-to-haves should live in less-rigorous territory until validated.
In effect, distinguishing core vs nice-to-have lets you allocate your limited time, budget, and engineering capacity to what matters most. You increase your chance of learning something meaningful — instead of building a shiny toy.
🛠 How We Solve It
Here’s how to apply this distinction in practice:
Define core vs nice-to-have
Write down your feature list. For each feature ask: “Without this, can the user still derive our value proposition?” If no → core; if yes → nice-to-have.
Use frameworks like MoSCoW (Must/Should/Could/Won’t) or the 80/20 rule (20% of features deliver 80% of value) to formalise.
Adjust technical & quality standards accordingly
For core features:
Prioritise automated tests (unit + integration)
Deploy via CI/CD
Use an evolutionary architecture that allows growth but starts small (walking skeleton)
For nice-to-have features:
If included in MVP, build a minimal version (e.g., manual workflow, no automation)
Fewer tests, simpler design, faster to implement
Mark as “to revisit post-MVP”
Use no-code/low-code and AI tools especially for nice-to-haves
Accept that if something is “nice, not core” you might build it with Bubble, Glide, or a Zapier workflow.
Use AI tools for prototyping: generate UI layouts, mock APIs, simulate feature behaviour. This reduces cost and speeds iteration.
Later, when usage is validated, you can decide to rewrite in code with full architecture. But treat that rewrite as a one-way door decision, and only after data supports it.
Document your decisions and scope
Maintain a feature register: each feature tagged with “Core / Nice-to-Have”, quality standard, implementation path (no-code/manual/auto).
Capture architecture choices: which modules, which tech stack, which parts are future bets.
This documentation keeps stakeholders aligned and allows you to defend quality trade-offs: “Yes, this feature is nice-to-have, so we’ll launch it manual and improve later.”
Review and iterate post-MVP
After launch, evaluate usage: are core features performing? Are nice-to-haves being used?
Based on data, decide which nice-to-have should be elevated to core, which should be deferred, and which should be removed.
Update your architecture accordingly: move features from no-code/manual to code only when justified.
⚖️ Trade-offs
Over-investing in nice-to-have features (quality, automation) steals cycles from life-or-death core features.
Under-investing in core features means you deliver something unstable, users bounce, you miss the hypothesis.
Manual/no-code flows for nice-to-haves work early, but if you never decide to rewrite them, you accumulate hidden technical debt and UX issues.
Delaying architecture decisions is fine until you’ve validated. But delaying too much for core functionality may cause rework and slow down later growth.
🚀 Next Steps (tomorrow morning)
Categorise your current backlog: tag each feature as Core / Nice-to-Have and mark its planned quality standard (code/manual/no-code).
For each Core feature, ensure you have an end-to-end slice built, tested via CI, and deploy-ready. For each Nice-to-Have in MVP, plan a manual or no-code deliverable or defer it entirely.
Create a “feature queue” for Nice-to-Haves: set a trigger metric (e.g., 1,000 users or 20% adoption) before upgrading to full code. Store this queue in your documentation.
📎 Primary Resources
Which feature in your current MVP list would you tag as “Nice-to-Have” and remove or convert to no-code for now? Reply and tell me — I’ll feature one example in the next issue.