About MVP scope in digital products

When building your next digital product, launching as quickly as possible is the priority.

There are only 24 hours in a day. Unless you have infinite resources. In that case, lend me some, would you?

How to prioritise?

Several ways. User stories is one of them. List all the user stories of your product, then choose the most important ones.

Lean Inception brings an interesting approach: launch in waves. Following some criteria, you can cut out waves of features that communicate with each other and result in meaningful releases.

Another more artisanal way is to be clear about the purpose of your product. And what needs to be delivered to fulfil that purpose.

Example: scheduling medical appointments. To launch something, we need a way to connect a person in need of an appointment to a person offering one. Let's speculate on two different versions.

Version 1: an app where patients can log in → see a list of available schedules based on the specialty they need and their geolocation → choose an option → see details about the person offering the appointment → schedule an appointment → receive reminders of upcoming appointments.

Version 2: a service offered through WhatsApp or any other messaging app.

Version 1 can handle more users, so it's more scalable. Version 2 is much faster and cheaper to put into practice.

Business limitations (more common when talking about larger companies) may make version 2 impossible. In this case, where can we slim down version 1? Do we need login? Or is a phone number to keep in touch enough?

If the focus is on getting the first customers, it's a good idea to put the responsibility on operations and keep the technology as lean as possible.

Focus on learning. Develop when necessary.