How to Build an App

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MVP Launch Track

Ship a minimum viable product quickly and safely without over-engineering

145

Minutes

6

Milestones

15

Total Steps

11

Required

Track Objectives

Validate product-market fit before over-investing
Ship working code to production quickly
Implement essential security and monitoring
Avoid premature optimization and complex architectures

1

Validate the Problem

Ensure you're building something people need

Step 1 Required surface

Job To Be Done

Validate you're solving a real problem before writing code

� Checkpoint: Can you describe the problem without mentioning your solution?

Step 2 Required surface

Concept Of Operations

Sketch how users will accomplish their goals

2

Plan Simply

Design for MVP scale, not future complexity

Step 1 Required surface

Threat Modeling

Identify the 3 most critical security risks to address now

� Checkpoint: Have you identified at least 3 potential threats and mitigation strategies?

Step 2 Required surface

Architecture Design

Choose the simplest architecture that could work for your MVP

Domain Specific/web Apps/architecture Decisions/microfrontend Vs Monolith

Learn when NOT to use complex architectures - avoid over-engineering

� Checkpoint: Do you understand the quantitative thresholds for architecture decisions?

Data Flow Mapping

Understand where data flows to spot security and compliance issues

3

Build Securely

Write code that works and is safe enough

Step 1 Required surface

Secure Coding Practices

Prevent SQL injection, XSS, and other critical vulnerabilities

Step 2 Required surface

Secret Management

Never commit credentials to version control

Code Quality

Write code that's readable enough to debug later

4

Test What Matters

Test critical paths, skip perfection

Step 1 Required surface

Unit Integration Testing

Test critical business logic and security boundaries

Step 2 Required surface

Security Testing

Run basic security scans before shipping

5

Ship Safely

Deploy with ability to rollback and monitor

Step 1 Required surface

Deployment Strategy

Ship with a rollback plan - because things will break

Infrastructure As Code

Make deployments repeatable and recoverable

6

Know When It Breaks

Basic monitoring to catch critical failures

Step 1 Required surface

Monitoring Logging

Get alerted when things break so you can fix them

Step 2 Required surface

Backup Recovery

Have a way to recover from data loss

What's Next

� After shipping MVP and validating product-market fit, consider production-ready track
� If handling sensitive data or need compliance, review security-hardening track
� Once you have real users and usage data, revisit architecture decisions with actual metrics