From Idea to MVP ✦ Turning Vision into a Bullet-Proof Product Requirements Doc

Field-tested advice for non-technical founders who need speed and rigour.

1 · Start with the problem, not the feature list

Two-thirds of new ventures disappear within ten years, and one-in-five never make it past year one (The Guardian, 2024-12-08) The Guardian.

Before you sketch a UI, articulate the customer pain in a single sentence and define out the problem it solves.

2 · Validate with real conversations

Mari Luukkainen’s validation playbook suggests the following pattern: identify audience → prototype → test with early adopters – remains the fastest way to kill bad ideas early (Luukkainen, 2023-07-03) Mari Luukkainen.

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Instead use The Mom Test: ask about their life, not your idea. Capture patterns in a one-pager named, Problem Interview Report.

3 · Frame testable hypotheses

Write each assumption as We believe X for Y will achieve Z. Then wire metrics to the Build-Measure-Learn loop (MOHARA, 2023-02-05) MOHARA.

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Example:

“We believe busy freelancers will save ≥15 min/day if invoices are auto-generated.”

Success metric, cohort, and data source are now explicit.

4 · Define the thinnest MVP slice

Ship one vertical slice that exercises the entire flow. Anything you can’t explain in a 30-second demo belongs in the backlog.(Apophis, 2025-05-28) Apophis

5 · Draft the Product Requirements Doc (PRD)

A modern PRD has five essentials:

1. Objective & success metrics – tie directly to the hypothesis.
   
   
2. Personas & user stories – three max, written in Gherkin or simple “As a… I want…” format.
   
   
3. Scope & priorities – rank items appropriately according to their necessity and impact
   
   
4. Non-functional criteria – performance, scalability, testability, reliability
   
   
5. Analytics plan – define events before writing code.
   
   

Product School’s 2025 template is a concise, up-to-date checklist you can copy (Product School, 2025-05-06) Product School.

6 · Run a 10-day PRD review sprint

Anything still fuzzy on Day 10 moves out of scope.

7 · Ship → Measure → Iterate

Release, collect data, revisit hypotheses. Update the PRD every sprint so it remains the source of truth, not shelfware.

👋 Need a hand?

Apophis specialises in guiding early-stage founders from napkin sketch to market-tested MVP—including facilitation of discovery interviews, rapid prototyping, and hands-on PRD workshops. Let’s turn your vision into code people actually want.

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