Prioritize

This is the part I explain worst and the part that most decides how everything ends up.

Building something small and building the least that answers your question look like the same thing, but they are not, and confusing them costs months.

The difference that gets expensive

A small but complete product, with its sign up, its settings and everything else, cannot be thrown away because it cost too much, and cannot be kept because it is not good enough. You end up maintaining something you no longer want, and that is worse than having started late. Adding hours does not fix it.

The least that answers your question is a different thing. It is the smallest object you can put in front of somebody to find out whether your assumption holds. It can be ugly, it can be half finished, and it can require you to do by hand behind it what the system would do later.

The first is built to last. The second is built to answer and disappear, and that is exactly the difference between one that ties you down and one that sets you free.

Write down what would make you stop

The only thing that has worked for me is writing down, before starting, what result would make me stop. One sentence is enough: if fewer than this many of the people I show it to have already done something about this problem, I drop it.

Written beforehand it is a decision. Raised afterwards it is a negotiation with myself that I always win, because by then I have grown fond of it and any result admits a kind reading.

That is what makes all the advice about killing your darlings useless at exactly the moment you need it: by then the cost of stopping looks enormous, and what makes it look enormous is precisely what is already lost either way.

The date as a tool

A date helps too, if you treat it as a limit that does not take argument. I do not mean it as pressure: it is the most honest way I know of deciding what stays out.

Scope with no date expands until it fills the time available, and since there is never a moment where you have to choose, you never choose. With a fixed date the conversation changes: it stops being what could we add and becomes what fits.

What I cut first

What I cut most is everything that exists because a product is supposed to have it. Sign up, profile, settings, password recovery, admin panel. None of it answers your question and all of it costs weeks.

Then, any case that is not the central one. The user who does things in a different order, the one with a large team, the one who needs to export. They all exist and none of them matters yet.

And last, automation. If you can do it by hand behind the scenes for the first few weeks, do it by hand. You will be slower at execution and enormously faster at learning.

Why it resembles tending a garden

The whole thing resembles tending a garden. You cannot make anything grow by force of will: you prepare the conditions and remove what is competing for the space.

It works the same here. You cannot make anybody want what you made, you can only keep taking away what is in the way. And of what you take away, almost none of it is ever needed again, which is the part that surprised me most the first few times.

Questions people ask about this

What is the smallest version worth building?

The smallest one that answers the question stopping you. Not the smallest one you could publish: that usually includes a pile of things that ask nothing. If you do not know which question it answers, you are not in this step yet.

How do I decide what to leave out?

Ask what you learn if you include it. If the answer is nothing you did not already know, it goes. Almost everything built for the sake of completeness falls into that category.

What if the client wants all of it?

Then the conversation is not about scope, it is about date and budget. Everything fits if there is time and money for everything. What you cannot have is all three, and that choice belongs to whoever is paying, not to you.

How long should a first version take?

Short enough that throwing it away would not hurt. In my experience six weeks is a reasonable ceiling: below that there is no time for anything serious, above it the attachment starts.