By Shivacha Engineering
Cut scope, not quality
The fastest path to learning is a product that does one job well. Speed comes from building less — not from skipping types, tests, CI or sensible data models, which cost little upfront and a great deal to retrofit.
Decisions that are expensive to change
A few decisions deserve care even in an MVP because changing them later is painful.
- Tenancy and permissions model
- Core data model and identifiers
- Money handling (if any) — use a ledger, not balance columns
- Authentication approach
- Analytics instrumentation
Decisions that can wait
Microservices, multi-region infrastructure, complex caching and custom design systems can wait. A well-structured monolith on a managed platform will carry most products well past product-market fit.
Instrument the hypotheses
An MVP exists to test assumptions. Define what behaviour would validate or invalidate them and instrument it from day one, so decisions after launch are based on data.
