Answer
What should be included in an MVP?
Short answer
An MVP should include exactly one complete path from a user arriving to getting the value you promised, plus whatever is strictly required to support it — usually accounts and payments. Everything else belongs in version two. If removing a feature would not stop a user getting value, it does not belong in the first version.
The useful test is the single-path test. Write down the one sentence a user would say if the product worked: 'I found a mobile mechanic in my suburb and booked one.' Everything needed for that sentence to be true is in scope. Everything else is not.
Notice what that test excludes. A settings page. A profile photo upload. Notification preferences. An onboarding tour. A dashboard. Each of these feels obviously necessary and none of them is on the path.
Two things do usually earn their place even though they are not the value itself. Accounts, if the user needs their data to still be there tomorrow. And payment, if the question you need answered is whether people will pay — in which case a working checkout is the whole point of the exercise.
The best discipline is to write the excluded list down and show it to the customer. If nobody complains about anything on it, you scoped it right.
The numbers
- Include
- The one complete path from arrival to value
- Include if needed
- Accounts, so data persists; payments, if willingness to pay is the question
- Exclude
- Settings, profiles, dashboards, onboarding tours, notification preferences, admin panels
- Exclude
- Anything supporting a user volume you do not have yet
- The test
- Would removing this stop a user getting the value? If not, cut it.
Worth knowing
Two things are not optional even in a first version: do not ship broken security, and do not ship a payment flow that can lose an order. Cutting scope is fine; cutting correctness is not.
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