Practical Guide to the MVP: Which Features to Include and Which to Cut

An MVP, or Minimum Viable Product, is an excellent way to test the waters and understand whether there is a market for an application. We have discussed this in other articles, for example this one.

However, what sometimes seems to emerge is that the MVP is seen as a rough and incomplete version of the final product, one that derives its success from the speed at which it can be built and brought to market. But is that really the case?

What an MVP Is and What It’s For

Let’s be clear: an MVP is not an incomplete or poorly crafted product. It is a minimal version of the product, but that doesn’t mean you can afford to launch something that is non-functional or badly built.

The purpose of an MVP is to validate the product, meaning to understand whether it can have a market or not. Concretely, this means:

• Understanding whether there are people genuinely interested in the product, beyond hypothetical interest gathered through surveys and interviews.
• Confirming that the product is able to solve the identified problem for its target users.
• Testing whether there is actual usage of the product and a potential willingness to pay for it.

The secret to building a good MVP is not to build too much, nor too little.

On one hand, overinvesting in an MVP, essentially turning it into a finished product with multiple secondary features, undermines the purpose of validation. Ideally, you want to understand whether the product can work before investing excessive time and money into it.

But that’s not all: introducing too many variables from the very beginning makes it difficult to determine what might not be working, if the product fails to achieve the expected success.

On the other hand, an MVP must not be a rough product built in a rush. If the MVP is poorly crafted, it becomes impossible to determine which factors drove users away: was it a lack of interest or a terrible UX?

It’s therefore clear that the right balance must be found between an overly polished product and one that does not meet even the minimum standards of functionality.

How to Decide Which Features to Include

At Mabiloft, when we build an MVP, we don’t think of the product as a list of features. Instead, we approach it as an ordered flow designed to validate the core hypothesis behind the final application.

Based on this assumption, the key question becomes: what needs to work well enough for the test to be valid?

A well-built MVP has:

• A few core features
• A clear flow
• A simple UX

Thanks to these essential elements, it becomes possible to validate the main premise by delivering the promised value to the user. Only in this way can we measure user behavior in a realistic scenario.

Let’s look at some concrete examples:

• Login should only be included when it is necessary to use the product.
• Payments should be introduced (even in a basic form) only when you need to validate willingness to pay.
• A minimum level of tracking should be included to understand how users behave within the platform.
• All standard interaction patterns are necessary, such as error messages, confirmation modals for risky actions, etc.
• It is always assumed that a product exposed to the public meets basic security requirements.

It is absolutely essential that the MVP does not contain blocking bugs: if users are driven away by frustrating malfunctions, it cannot be said that the core concept of the product has been validated.

In general, all elements without which the validation test would be distorted must be included.

Is Branding Important?

One aspect that is often overlooked in an MVP is branding. Intuitively, it may seem like it’s not critical for validating functionality. This is often true, especially when other roles handle marketing and introduce users to the product.

However, the situation is quite different when users are expected to discover the product on their own, particularly when it involves sensitive areas such as finance or health. In such cases, branding helps convey the product’s solidity and builds the trust needed for users to share their personal data.

Moreover, especially for products targeting a specific audience, branding becomes a necessary tool for positioning. For example, a product aimed at a young audience but using cold and technical communication might alienate its target purely due to communication style, effectively invalidating the test.

In any case, a fully developed brand is often not required. A minimal identity that speaks to the right audience and conveys reliability is usually sufficient.

What Is Not Necessary in an MVP

Sometimes, when designing an MVP, the real difficulty is not deciding what to include, but what can be left out. We have already said that everything that is part of the core flow of the application is necessary. So what can we cut?

All secondary features are excluded from the MVP, meaning those that enrich and improve the product but are not strictly necessary for its core functionality. Some examples include:

• Complex dashboards
• Advanced customization
• Sophisticated admin panels
• Full branding

Fake It Until You Make It… Literally

In particular, anything that can be simulated or handled manually behind the scenes does not need to be present in the first version. What matters is that the user perceives everything as working, and it matters little if the actual functioning is, at first, only apparent.

This may seem counterintuitive: why simulate functionality? Let’s take the example of an application that generates detailed reports from collected and uploaded data. The report generation feature could require significant time to develop.

If our goal is to understand whether users download the application, actually upload data, and are interested in the report, it may be more convenient to initially create the report manually and deliver it outside the app.

In this way, before committing to the development of a complex feature, we will already know whether it is important to users or not.

How to Manage Technical Debt

Building an MVP often involves creating technical debt, meaning making trade-offs in terms of overall system quality and scalability in order to achieve a faster go-to-market.

However, as long as it is intentional, technical debt is not inherently bad, but often part of strategic decision-making.

When building an MVP, the focus is on product validation, not on technical quality, except for ensuring the minimum required for the product to appear solid and free from security vulnerabilities.

As for the killer features, meaning those that drive users to download the application or sign up for the platform, it is essential that they are well executed. The core of the product must be solid, as this is what the MVP is truly meant to validate.

And everything else? Every other aspect can be sacrificed and rewritten later if necessary.

The Practical Guide: Include or Cut?

Let’s close this article with some concrete guidelines on how to decide what should be included in your product’s MVP.

The questions you should ask yourself to determine whether a feature should be postponed to a later version or is immediately necessary are:

• Without this feature, does the product lose its value?
• If this feature is missing, is the validation test compromised?
• Is the feature necessary to build trust in the product?
• Is it impossible to replace the feature with a simulation?

If the answer to at least one of these questions is yes, then the feature should be included. Otherwise, these are features that may help make the product appear more complete, but can wait.

A well-built MVP is not minimal just as a cost-saving measure, but also because it carefully selects what to show to the user.

If you are thinking about launching your product and are struggling to understand what to include in your MVP, get in touch with us. We will help you determine what should be included and what can wait, as well as identify the essential flows and must-have features. Thanks to our Sprint Check, we have helped dozens of startups do exactly that, and we can help you too.