MVP Scope Discipline: The 4-Week Rule

The most common MVP failure mode is not scope creep. It is scope misclassification: founders confuse 'first version' with 'first version that does not embarrass us.' Those are different documents, and the latter is almost always wrong.

Teams that ship fast — including the ones working with experienced MVP development partners — share a discipline: the first cut goes to real users in four weeks or less. Everything that does not fit gets a date and a label, not a delete. The point of the four-week rule is not to ship something bad. It is to learn fast enough that the next four weeks build the right thing.