Series A Product scoping -- The MVP to tech debt challenge

It's hard to find (or know) the line between necessary scope / work and "nice to have". You want to be on an aware path (Product should know current view of the full potential scope) but delivering on minimal incremental scope to drive value. However, in doing so I think it's easy to get a bit too fancy and ignore foundational concepts at the expense of your platform when initial value is proven and you're trying to scale.

The answer here is obviously extremely context dependent from build the absolute bare minimum (or sell before building) to prove value to something more nuanced as you gain traction. That's the paradox though, when do you shift your flying formation along the way? And once you do have you locked in tech debt that actually dissuades the "right" build time and again each new step / feature along the growth journey where you're considering shifting to "right".

A common question to address this is "do we have to build it that slightly better way to realize feature value vs hacking over our current approach? The problem with this question is that software is infinitely flexible and the literal answer to this can only ever be "no". Well if there's a path with our current system just build a door to the bathroom through the other bedroom and on we go, problem solved. Then when a bedroom starts doubling as a hallway, then a second, then a third. At which point are you really going to go back and fix 3 bedrooms just to have that hallway you should clearly have?

Obviously as much as possible you can try to anticipate the hallway and leave an easy way to build that if the first bedroom truly becomes a good idea and a second and third come along. Sometimes that's easy sometimes it isn't.

No real glib answers or sage advice in this post unfortunately just observing a tough one to solve well for Product & Eng in fast growing startups.