The fastest way to make a product cheaper is to not build most of it. The Standish Group has tracked software project outcomes for decades and consistently finds that around 64% of features are rarely or never used — which means the average product spends the majority of its build budget on things that do not matter to anyone. The discipline that prevents this is not better estimation or faster sprints; it is a willingness to cut before you start. The method is straightforward: list every planned feature, then label each with two questions:
- Does any other feature depend on this one? If not, it is non-critical.
- Is there another way to get the same result without building this? If yes, there is a workaround.
A feature that is non-critical and has a workaround is a candidate for removal — not because it is useless, but because its absence costs nothing and its presence costs engineering time, maintenance, edge cases, documentation, and bugs. Run the analysis, rank by severity, remove from the bottom up, and stop when removing anything would actually break something. What remains is the minimum viable product in the literal sense: the smallest set of features where every one is load-bearing.
