The hardest skill in product engineering isn't building. It's knowing which half of the feature to cut.

Not MVP theatre, where you strip everything until there's nothing left to learn from. The real skill is finding the smallest thing that teaches you something. What's the one part of this feature that, once it's in production, tells you whether the rest is even worth building?

Most teams skip this step. They spec the full feature, estimate the full feature, build the full feature, and then learn that half of it was wrong. The feedback came too late. Ship the smaller thing first. Let reality tell you what's next. You'll throw away less code, and you'll build the right thing more often.