Product strategy & MVP planning
Most failed builds die in the two weeks before code
Unbounded scope. A backlog ranked by opinion. Developers hired before anything was defined. The wreckage always traces back to the same fortnight — the one where nobody wrote anything down. We sell that fortnight as a product: a fixed-price planning sprint that hands you everything a build team needs, credited toward the build if you do it with us.
The math nobody runs
The cost of building the wrong thing
Skipping planning doesn’t save the planning money. It defers it — with interest, paid at build rates. Here is the same product, run both ways.
- Month 1–3A dev shop quotes off a call. Building starts against a moving target; every founder idea becomes a mid-sprint change request.
- Month 4–6The demo doesn't match the vision. Rework begins. The relationship sours over whose fault the ambiguity was — it was nobody's; nothing was written down.
- Month 7+A second team is hired to rebuild “properly.” The first spend is written off. Runway that should have bought traction bought a lesson instead.
A $40k+ rebuild
plus six months of runway, spent proving the scope was never defined
- Week 1The Planning Sprint. Scope gets a boundary, the backlog gets an order, the architecture gets options with trade-offs, and the build gets a real estimate.
- Month 1–3The build executes against acceptance criteria instead of memory. Change requests still happen — but against a written baseline, so they're decisions, not disputes.
- Month 4+Version one ships as scoped. The roadmap already says what release two must prove. The sprint fee was credited against the build anyway.
$1,500 — credited toward the build
the most leveraged money in the whole project
MVP Planning Sprint — $1,500, 5 days
What a real MVP scope looks like, document by document
Not a slide deck. Not a proposal. A working dossier your build team — ours or anyone else’s — executes against. Every artifact below arrives finished at the end of the five days, and the full fee is credited if you build with us.
Problem & outcome definition
What you're solving, for whom, and what “working” measurably means — the sentence every later decision gets tested against.
User journeys & flow maps
Every path a user takes from first open to core habit, drawn out — including the unhappy paths most founders never think about until support tickets arrive.
MVP scope & prioritized backlog
A hard boundary around version one, and a backlog ordered by evidence, effort and risk — not by whoever argued loudest.
Release roadmap
What ships when, in what order, and what each release is designed to prove before you fund the next one.
Architecture options & risks
Two to three viable build approaches with honest trade-offs — cost, speed, lock-in — plus the delivery risks we'd flag if we were spending your money.
Acceptance criteria & build estimate
Pass/fail definitions for every scoped feature, and a build estimate grounded in all of the above — not a number pulled from a sales call.
Five days. $1,500. Credited in full toward the build — so if we end up building your product, the planning was effectively free. If someone else builds it, they inherit a scope worth executing.
Start the sprintFor healthtech & mental-health founders
The Healthtech & Mental Health MVP Blueprint
Health products carry a question regular apps don’t: which parts of this can we ship now, and which parts need specialists before anyone touches them? Founders who can’t answer it either freeze — and build nothing — or barrel ahead and build the regulated parts by accident.
The Blueprint is the full Planning Sprint plus the mapping that answers that question. We draw the boundary between what you can ship now and what needs qualified legal, clinical, security or regulatory specialists — so your MVP stays on the shippable side while the roadmap knows exactly where the specialist gates sit.
Honest boundary: this is planning, not certification. The Blueprint is explicitly not legal advice, a clinical opinion, or regulatory sign-off. It maps where those specialists are required and when — it never replaces them.
Intended-use boundary
A written line between what your product does and what it must never claim to do — the sentence that keeps a wellness app from accidentally becoming an unregistered medical device.
Sensitive-data & claims inventory
Every piece of health-adjacent data you'd collect and every claim your marketing wants to make, catalogued — so you know which ones are free and which ones carry obligations.
Crisis & clinical dependency map
Where your product could touch crisis situations, clinical decisions or provider workflows — and how the MVP routes around those paths until they're specialist-approved.
Specialist decision points
The exact moments in your roadmap where a privacy lawyer, clinician, security assessor or regulatory consultant must be engaged — named, sequenced, and budgetable in advance.
One gap? Fill one gap.
Every sprint artifact, available on its own
Some teams don’t need the whole week — they need one missing document, priced plainly and delivered fast.
Product planning workshop
90 minutes + written notes. For founders who need decisions, not a full sprint.
RequestProblem statement & MVP scope
Turn an idea or a feature list into a bounded, buildable version one.
RequestUser journeys & flow maps
The experience drawn end to end before anyone designs or builds it.
RequestFeature prioritization & release roadmap
For backlogs currently ranked by opinion instead of goals, evidence, effort and risk.
RequestPRD / requirements document
Functional requirements, acceptance criteria, dependencies, assumptions, and out-of-scope calls.
RequestTechnical discovery & architecture options
Build approaches, integration map, risks and an estimate — before you commit to anything.
RequestAnalytics & measurement plan
Events, funnels, KPIs and experiment design, so launch week produces answers instead of vibes.
RequestWhen planning never stops
A product lead and a CTO, without the two salaries
Fractional product planning
Roadmap kept current, requirements written before every build cycle, backlog re-prioritized against evidence, releases planned with acceptance criteria, delivery coordinated. The product-lead function for teams between first build and first product hire.
Talk about fitFractional CTO
Senior technical judgment on retainer: architecture decisions, vendor and hiring calls, technical due-diligence readiness, and someone who can look a dev shop's estimate in the eye. Built for funded startups with non-technical founders.
Talk about fitQuestions founders ask
Before you book the sprint
I already know what I want to build. Why pay for planning?
Because “I know what I want” and “a developer can build it without guessing” are different things. The sprint turns your vision into artifacts a build team can execute against — scoped features, acceptance criteria, prioritized backlog, architecture options with trade-offs. Founders who skip this step don't skip the cost; they pay it later in rework, at build rates instead of planning rates.
What happens after the sprint — am I locked into building with you?
No. Every deliverable is written so any competent team can build from it. If you build with us, the full sprint fee is credited toward the build. If you take it to another agency or an in-house team, you own everything and lose nothing.
Is the Healthtech Blueprint a compliance certification?
Explicitly not, and we put that in writing. The Blueprint maps your intended-use boundary, sensitive-data and claims inventory, and the points where qualified legal, clinical, security or regulatory specialists must be brought in. It tells you where the boundary is — it does not certify that you're on the right side of it. That certification work belongs to specialists, and the Blueprint tells you exactly which ones and when.
Can I buy just one document instead of the full sprint?
Yes. Every artifact in the sprint is available standalone — a PRD at $799, user journeys at $399, technical discovery at $999, and so on. The sprint exists because the documents are stronger when they're built together in one focused week, but if you only have one gap, fill only that gap.
What does fractional product planning actually look like month to month?
A standing cadence: roadmap and backlog kept current, requirements written before each build cycle, releases planned with acceptance criteria, and priorities re-argued against evidence instead of the loudest voice. It's the product-lead function at $1,500–$3,000/mo instead of a $150k hire — most useful between your first build and your first product hire.
How technical do I need to be to get value from this?
Not at all — non-technical founders are the majority of who we plan with. Every document is written in plain language first, with the technical depth beneath it for whoever builds. The architecture options doc, for instance, gives you the trade-offs in business terms: cost, speed, lock-in, and what each choice makes harder later.
Where planning leads
What usually comes next
Let’s create together
Spend five days before you spend fifty thousand
Tell us what you're building and where you're stuck. We'll tell you honestly whether you need a full sprint, a single document, or just a 90-minute workshop.