Every founder building a first app version hits the same wall: the feature list is longer than the budget and timeline allow. The instinct is to keep everything because it might matter, but that instinct is exactly what turns a three-month build into a nine-month build that never ships.
Table of Contents
This guide walks through a practical process for deciding what actually belongs in your app’s first version, what gets pushed to a later release, and what should be cut entirely — using frameworks product teams rely on, not guesswork.
Quick Answer
Cut anything that isn’t required to prove your app’s core value to a real user. Keep only the features tied directly to the one problem your app solves best, sort the rest with a prioritization method like MoSCoW or RICE, and move everything below the cut line to a ‘later’ list instead of deleting it outright.
Start With the One Job Your App Has to Do
Before cutting anything, write down the single core outcome your app needs to deliver for a user to consider it worthwhile. Not three outcomes — one. If you can’t state it in a sentence, that’s the first problem to fix, because every feature decision after this point depends on it.
This is the idea behind the minimum viable product, a concept popularized by Eric Ries in The Lean Startup: an MVP isn’t a stripped-down or low-quality product, it’s the version that lets you collect the most validated learning about what users actually want with the least amount of build effort. The goal isn’t ‘minimal’ for its own sake — it’s cutting anything that doesn’t directly help you learn whether the core idea works.
Once that core job is defined, go through your feature list and ask of each one: does this directly enable the core job, or does it support something adjacent? Anything adjacent is a candidate for cutting, no matter how good the idea is.
Sort What’s Left With a Real Framework
Gut feeling is a bad way to rank a feature list, because everyone on a team tends to be attached to the feature they proposed. Two frameworks make the decision more objective.
MoSCoW sorts every feature into Must Have, Should Have, Could Have, or Won’t Have. Must Haves are non-negotiable for launch; Should Haves are important but the app survives without them at launch; Could Haves are nice-to-haves you’d add if time allows; Won’t Haves are explicitly out of scope for now. A common guideline from the DSDM framework, where MoSCoW originated, is to cap Must Haves at roughly 60% of your total build effort — not 60% of the feature count, but the time and work they represent — leaving the rest as a buffer split between Should Haves and Could Haves. If Must Haves are eating almost all of your available effort, you haven’t cut enough, and you have no room to absorb the surprises every build runs into.
RICE, a framework developed at Intercom, scores each feature on Reach (how many users it affects), Impact (how much it moves the needle for them), Confidence (how sure you are about those estimates), and Effort (how much work it takes to build), then divides (Reach x Impact x Confidence) by Effort to get a comparable score. RICE is especially useful when your team disagrees about priorities, because it forces the disagreement into specific, arguable numbers instead of opinions.
Pick one framework and apply it consistently across the whole list rather than switching methods mid-way, which is what causes inconsistent cuts.
Tips and Common Mistakes
Don’t confuse ‘cut’ with ‘delete.’ Keep a running backlog of everything that got pushed out of v1 — a Should Have or Could Have list — so the team can revisit it after launch instead of relitigating the same argument every sprint.
Watch for features that exist to satisfy an internal stakeholder rather than a user. ‘The investor wants to see X’ or ‘a competitor has X’ are real pressures, but they’re a different category from ‘a user needs X to get value from the app,’ and they should be evaluated separately, not smuggled into the Must Have list.
Be wary of features that feel small to build but are actually infrastructure in disguise — things like multi-language support, complex permission tiers, or white-labeling. These often cost far more than they look like on a feature list because they touch the whole app, not just one screen.
Don’t cut anything related to core account security, data handling, or app-store compliance requirements just to hit a launch date — those aren’t optional scope, they’re the cost of shipping at all.
After you ship v1, use real usage data — not opinions — to decide what comes off the backlog next. The features users actually request or visibly struggle without are a far better signal than what seemed important during planning.
Explore more: more app development guides.
MVP feature prioritization FAQs
How many features should a first app version have?
There’s no fixed number — it depends on the core job the app does. The better test is whether every feature in the list is required for a user to get real value from that one core job. If a feature isn’t required for that, it’s a candidate to cut, regardless of how the total count looks.
What’s the difference between an MVP and a low-quality app?
An MVP is scoped narrowly, not built poorly. It should still be polished and reliable for the features it does include — the cuts are about scope, not about cutting corners on quality, security, or usability for what remains.
Should I tell users about features I cut?
It can help. A visible roadmap or ‘coming soon’ note for major cut features manages expectations and can even validate demand — if users ask about it often, that’s a signal to move it up the backlog.
What if my team disagrees on what to cut?
Use a scoring framework like RICE instead of debating feature-by-feature. Scoring forces disagreements into specific numbers (reach, impact, effort estimates) that can be discussed and adjusted, which resolves most conflicts faster than an open-ended debate.
Build It With GTStudios
Need help with your website, app, or small-business tech? GTStudios builds web, apps, and software for small businesses. See how GTStudios can help.
Want dev news in your inbox? Subscribe to the free newsletter.
Photo: Fabrice Florin, for the Wikimedia Foundation / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.