Kill Your Darlings: How to Know Which Features to Ax From Your MVP

“Kill your darlings” is a gruesome writers’ axiom most often attributed to William Faulkner. It’s an expression that means you should delete anything that serves no purpose other than to make you (the creator) happy.

You don’t have to be the literary sort to benefit from this sage advice. “Kill your darlings” applies to developing a minimal viable product, too.

Startups talk about MVPs all the time, but few people actually do them well. A good MVP is user-friendly and viable, but it only has the minimum features needed to attract user interest.

It doesn’t have 20 features. It has one or two.

But you love all your features! How do you get rid of them? 

The answer is simple: Kill your darlings.

Questions to Ask Yourself Before Developing Your MVP

The most ideal time to start paring down your MVP’s features is at conception. You should never sit down and brainstorm all the cool features in the world, then try to design an app that includes them all. That would be a clunky, unusable disaster.

Instead, start by asking yourself these simple questions:

1. Can you visualize the idea?

In other words, do you have a validated concept?

I like to use the example of pie. When you think about pie, does a specific kind of pie pop into your mind? That’s a validated idea. If you think about your product and the vision is crystal clear, you have a validated idea.

But let’s say you just want something sweet. This is a little more vague, and there are some questions to ask yourself before you find the perfect dessert. This is a pre-validated idea, and you’ll need to be even more willing to let your MVP start bare and grow.

2. What is everyone else doing?

I know — your mom always told you not to worry about everyone else, but in business, you have to understand the competition.

I like to use the tool App Annie to get a feel for what else exists in a particular market. Using a tool to get a view of the marketplace lets you see the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors, as well as needs that aren’t being met.

3 Tips for Creating Your MVP

Now that you understand what exactly you want to build, it’s time to determine how it will be used and by whom so you can kill any unnecessary features.

1. Create personas. The best way to get insight into how your app will be used is to create personas. This will help you think about the feature sets a particular market might be looking for.

Here are a few questions to consider when creating a persona:

1. Who will use your app?
2. Why will they use it?
3. How will they use it?

You should create as many personas as you can dream up to help you understand what your target user base is looking for. This will make it easier to focus on the features they need and eliminate the features they don’t.

2. Create wireframes. I like to use AppCooker because you can also use it on iPads. This gives you the ability to experience your app just as the user will, which fuels a great user experience. Which features will your users return to again and again, and which features are just window dressing?

3. Get customer validation. Imagining how people will use your product is a good starting point, but you aren’t your users. They may surprise you. Find a few test users who fit the personas you’ve created, and allow them to use the MVP for a while to identify the gaps. What do they wish was available but isn’t? More importantly, what have you built in that they’re ignoring? These are the features you should consider cutting.

Creating a good MVP is an art form, and killing your darlings takes courage and an uncomfortable lack of ego. But if you exercise restraint and build only what your users need, you’ll soon find that what your customers tell you to create is better than anything you could have imagined