You shipped the MVP. The business loved it. Three years later, you’re still paying interest.
Every MVP comes with a hidden interest rate, but most teams never calculate it.
Here’s the reality: you cut observability to save 2 weeks, but now debugging takes 3 times as long. You skip schema versioning to ship quickly, which means every integration change requires coordinated releases across four teams. You defer establishing proper boundaries because “we’ll refactor later.” However, it costs ten times as much as doing it right from the start.
The business focuses on velocity. Engineering sees the accumulating debt.
This isn’t just technical debt, it’s structural debt. The shortcuts you take aren’t bugs to be fixed; they’re fundamental decisions that limit every future choice. You can’t patch your way out of this; you can only rebuild or live with the interest payments forever.
The real question isn’t whether MVPs create debt. It’s whether you’re honestly calculating the interest rate.
Most organizations optimize only for the cost of building the MVP. The best ones also optimize for the total cost of ownership, which includes hidden carrying costs such as slower future changes, increased cognitive load, coordination overhead, and engineers leaving because the work stops being interesting.
How do you distinguish between a necessary constraint and premature optimization when scoping an MVP?