Finding the True MVP

This week was about finalising and reducing scope rather than building new features.

My goals were as follows:

• Define the remaining details by documenting workflows and creating detailed UI mockups
• Cut as much scope as possible whilst preserving the pieces required to make the MVP genuinely useful
• Decide what needed to be built, and in what order, to hit my August deadline

This meant working through the final designs for the Pando MVP and forcing myself to answer every unresolved question I encountered. Whilst the workflow seems straightforward, as I dug into each part of the system, edge cases emerged that required decisions about how features should behave, how different entities should interact and how exactly certain workflows should be triggered.

As I proceeded, I looked for every opportunity to simplify. Wherever functionality overlapped, I consolidated it. Anything that wasn't essential was pushed into a future version.

The result is a much smaller MVP, clearer requirements, and a realistic implementation plan for the coming weeks.

That simplification removed entire workflows, reduced implementation effort, and made the product significantly easier to reason about.

It's easy to feel productive when sketching concepts at a high level, but real complexity often only reveals itself when you define exactly how a system behaves. Had I jumped straight into implementation, many of these issues would only have surfaced later, when they were far more expensive to fix.

As a result, Pando feels significantly more concrete than it did a week ago. I now have all of the key screens in front of me, the workflows make sense, and there is far less uncertainty about what actually needs to be built.

In this case, hitting my deadline wasn't about coding features as quickly as possible. It was about removing them, simplifying the system, and gaining clarity on what truly matters before implementation begins.

Next week, the real fun starts.