Balancing Minimum and Viable

When developing a minimum viable product, it's important to strike the correct balance between minimum and viable. Overengineering at this stage will kill momentum, but creating too many half-baked features will leave customers - even those willing to try out a barebones MVP - unsatisfied.

Naturally, your product will bring some fresh air to your selected target market and provide something new. By building something new, you're also assuming that whatever you provide is actually what customers want.

To create an effective MVP, you need to focus on your riskiest assumptions. Features that can prove or disprove your assumptions should be prioritised, because negative customer feedback from these features can immediately kill your product. This can be either because the implementation was sub-par (lacking focus) or because the feature is simply not important enough to the customer.

At the same time, critical infrastructure choices should not be neglected. Security of customer data is vital, and choosing the right place to host your infrastructure (whether in the cloud or on bare metal) can be the difference between having to spend a lot of time revisiting earlier choices or being able to scale quickly if your assumptions prove correct and your product gains traction.

Yours,
Søren