5 principles to ship your MVP faster
#1 Perfect is the enemy of good
You are passionate about your idea and you want to make the best impression. However, making it perfect on the first try is impossible. Instead, make a conscious choice to ship it before you feel it’s ready.
#2 Build to learn
The key word in MVP is the minimum viable product. How do you make it viable? You want to learn what is valuable to your users and what they would pay for. Build the most efficient version and get real feedback. Iterate.
#3 Put engineering in service of product
Engineers love to work on the bleeding edge, using the latest technologies. Sometimes crude and non-sexy is the better approach to test something fast. Make sure engineering understands that. The time for cool implementations will come, but it’s most likely not on day one, unless your product is the technology itself.
#4 Don’t build it at all
Let’s say you want to test your product idea. Is there a way to test that does not require any engineering effort? Can you achieve the same with a questionnaire, interview, email? This is the fastest way to move closer to the MVP. And the closer you are, the more you focus on engineering. Because at that point, your solution is what uniquely provides the value.
#5 Overengineering
You imagine your product in the hands of millions of users and start building it in a scalable way, using all the hyped tech. It costs a ton of engineering effort = burns money. Make something people want, iterate fast, scale later. Just invest enough not to back yourself into a corner.