10 tips for scoping your MVP

One of the major ancient mysteries of the startup world, even with AI and no-code and many other helper utilities, scoping the MVP remains a big question mark. Scoping your MVP correctly is essential for controlling not only the costs and time-to-market, but also your personal time, effort, energy, stress-level, headspace. Keeping it minimal will bring many benefits to your founder journey, and it doesn’t limit the subsequent improvements of your product, as the small releases can be rolled out as soon as a few weeks after the MVP launch. By then you’ll be in a much better position regarding the launch execution pressure, customer feedback anxiety and the team energy levels.

Here are 10 tips that might just help you nail it & scope it: 

1. While it’s perfectly understandable that every feature is dear to you after maybe even years of envisioning your product, this is a moment to be very rational and make that M in your MVP proud. Be extra rational and firm!
2. Start by mapping out your high-level features breakdown on a storyboard in order to get a clear visual overview. Stick to the user perspective and avoid stating implementation options at this point.
3. Drag out of the MVP release section everything that is not absolutely necessary. A person needs to sign up, but they don’t have to have a 3D animated avatar. 
4. Go back to that lean canvas you have hanging on your fridge and make sure you haven’t dragged out your unique value proposition. 
5. Repeat steps 3. & 4. until you are sure that you have your UVP in and almost everything else out. 
6. If you don’t have a tech co-founder, get a few hours from a fractional CTO to understand the feasibility, risks, costs, timeline etc. for your high-level features (bare in mind that these are rough estimations as the storyboard is not a detailed backlog). Based on the tech input, you might decide to go without some less achievable features, or include some low-hanging fruits .

7. If you are still not sure whether to drag in/out a certain feature, go back to talking to your potential users (it doesn’t have to be an official survey, as most of the founders are “scratching their own itch”, the people from their work/hobby/lifestyle network can help). Try not to ask feature specific questions but rather find out about their habits, challenges, goals.
8. If your product is in a regulated market (fx fintech), you might wanna consult a domain expert.
9. Even if you are “scratching your own itch” and have a lot of domain knowledge, you might wanna consult a domain expert (fx you are a parent solving a children’s education pain point – still, consult an education professional).
10. Before the first line of code gets written or generated by a no-code tool, consider whether your MVP has to be in fact coded. For example, many marketplaces started as a simple static landing page with a form that gets submitted to their email (or nowadays it could be a WhatsApp chatbot) and were doing the initial transactions by manually facilitating the communication between the seller and the buyer and the eventual purchase. The software platform then comes after the idea validation and traction proof.

. Scope it, minimize it, nail it!