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Summary – Under pressure to launch an MVP quickly while managing timelines, costs and quality, a rigorous SDLC ensures consistency, traceability and risk control. From requirements specs and interactive prototyping to continuous integration—and by distinguishing POCs, prototypes and the MVP—each phase optimizes real‐world feedback and stabilizes the project budget. Solution: adopt Agile/Scrum, a modular tech stack and a hybrid model combining internal and external expertise to accelerate time-to-market while limiting fixed costs.
In an environment where responsiveness and quality are decisive factors for a startup’s success, establishing a rigorous software life cycle is essential. From requirements gathering through maintenance, each stage of the SDLC ensures consistency, traceability, and risk management.
At the same time, distinguishing between a POC, a prototype, and an MVP enables smart investment and rapid real-world feedback. Finally, choosing between an in-house team, an external provider, or a hybrid model—and adopting a structured Agile/Scrum methodology—ensures a fast launch and continuous adjustments based on user feedback.
Framing Your Software Life Cycle
Frame your SDLC to build a solid foundation. Ensure traceability and minimize surprises.
Define Functional and Technical Requirements
The first step is to collect and formalize business needs. It’s crucial to prepare a detailed requirements document that outlines expected features, technical constraints, security standards, and performance indicators. This formalization helps eliminate ambiguities and stabilizes project scope in terms of timeline and budget.
Beyond functional specifications, it’s important to document non-functional requirements: performance, scalability, compatibility, and portability. These elements guide the overall architecture and influence technology and infrastructure choices. Without this vision, future evolutions may cause delays or cost overruns.
Finally, a continuous validation process with stakeholders ensures that specifications remain aligned with strategic objectives. Each SDLC milestone should include a requirements review to verify alignment and detect discrepancies early. This framework guarantees smooth collaboration between business and IT teams and limits late-stage corrections.
Design and Create Prototypes
The design phase involves modeling the interface and user experience. Wireframes and high-fidelity mockups translate functional flows and anticipated use cases. This stage validates ergonomic coherence and gathers feedback before any costly development.
Interactive prototyping simulates application behavior without implementing the full codebase. This approach encourages quick feedback from future users and informs navigation, accessibility, and visual design choices. It’s a limited investment that delivers significant time savings during development.
For example, a young fintech company built a mobile payment app prototype in two weeks. This artifact revealed an overly complex user journey and enabled upstream screen adjustments. It demonstrates how a well-designed prototype can prevent costly redesigns and accelerate stakeholder buy-in.
Development, QA, and Deployment
Once the prototype is approved, development proceeds in iterative cycles, incorporating unit tests and code reviews. Implementing continuous integration automates builds, tests, and artifact generation. This provides ongoing visibility into code quality and allows rapid regression fixes.
The QA phase includes functional, performance, and security tests. Load tests identify breaking points, while security audits uncover vulnerabilities. Test coverage should be sufficient to mitigate production risks without becoming a bottleneck.
Finally, automated deployment through CI/CD pipelines guarantees reliable, repeatable releases. Staging environments mirror production, enabling final integration tests. This DevOps maturity minimizes service interruptions and speeds up go-live.
Distinguishing POC, Prototype, and MVP
Differentiate between POC, prototype, and MVP to invest at the right time. Focus your resources on the right objectives.
Understanding the Proof of Concept (POC)
A POC validates the technical feasibility of an innovation or technology integration. It’s a limited proof of concept focused on one or two use cases, implemented quickly to assess potential and technical risks. A POC does not target the full user experience but aims to resolve technical uncertainties.
This short-form evaluation checks API compatibility, algorithm performance, or cloud infrastructure maturity. At the end of a POC, the team has a concrete verdict on technical viability and the effort required to reach production readiness.
Therefore, the POC is a rapid decision-making tool before committing significant resources. It prevents premature investments in unvalidated assumptions and serves as a basis for accurately estimating the rest of the project.
Creating a Functional Prototype
A prototype goes beyond a POC by adding a user dimension and covering multiple interconnected features. It should replicate the main user journey and demonstrate overall application behavior. Even if incomplete, this functional mockup allows end-to-end flow testing.
Prototypes demand greater focus on ergonomics, design, and navigation. They must be refined enough to collect detailed feedback from end users and project sponsors. Adjustments at this stage determine the relevance of subsequent development efforts.
A Lausanne-based biotech startup developed a sample management platform prototype for its labs. It integrated key workflows and obtained actionable feedback from researchers. This example shows how a prototype can refine interfaces and processes before the MVP, reducing tickets at production launch.
Defining and Validating Your Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
The MVP includes only the essential features needed to solve the core customer problem. It aims to test the offering in a real market and quickly gather quantitative feedback. Unlike a prototype, an MVP must be deployable and operable in production conditions.
Defining the MVP scope requires prioritizing features by value delivered and development complexity. The goal is not a perfect product but a functional one that measures interest, adoption, and usage feedback.
MVP success is measured by key indicators like conversion rate, active user volume, and qualitative feedback. This data informs the roadmap and guides subsequent iterations.
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Choosing In-House, Outsourcing, or Hybrid Model
Select your execution model: in-house team, specialized outsourcing, or hybrid. Optimize costs and expertise.
In-House Team: Strengths and Limits
An in-house team fosters deep business knowledge and responsiveness. Developers and project managers are fully integrated into the company culture, ensuring better understanding of challenges and strong team cohesion.
However, recruiting and training the right profiles can take months, creating an HR effort and high fixed costs. Downtime may lead to under-utilization, while peak periods often require ad hoc external expertise.
This model suits continuous evolution and long-term support needs. For a rapid MVP launch, combining internal skills with external resources is sometimes more effective.
Specialized Outsourcing
Engaging a specialized external provider offers immediate access to advanced skills and proven methodologies. Dedicated teams immerse themselves in the project and bring insights from similar engagements.
This approach reduces time-to-market and allows budget control through fixed-price contracts or predefined daily rates. It’s ideal for one-off developments or MVP launches requiring specific expertise.
However, outsourcing carries risks of cultural misalignment and dependency if the provider isn’t aligned with your vision. It’s crucial to formalize a collaboration framework, including governance, reporting, and knowledge management.
Hybrid Model
The hybrid model combines the best of in-house and external teams. Core competencies (architecture, product ownership) remain internal, ensuring product mastery, while development and QA can be outsourced to a specialized provider.
This setup offers high flexibility, allowing resource adjustments according to project progress and priorities. It also keeps fixed costs low while retaining domain expertise at the heart of the team.
Operating in Agile Scrum and an Appropriate Stack
Operate in Agile/Scrum with key roles and a tailored tech stack. Accelerate your iterations and maximize quality.
Scrum and 2–4-Week Sprints
Scrum structures the project into time-boxed cycles called sprints, typically two to four weeks long. Each sprint includes planning, development, review, and retrospective, ensuring a steady pace and frequent checkpoints.
The sprint planning session selects backlog items to develop based on priority and team capacity. This granularity offers visibility into progress and enables quick corrective action if needed.
The end-of-sprint review involves a demonstration to stakeholders, providing immediate feedback. The retrospective identifies process improvement areas, reinforcing continuous learning and team efficiency.
Key Roles: Product Owner, Tech Lead, and Team
The Product Owner (PO) bridges strategic vision and the development team. They manage the backlog, prioritize user stories, and validate functional deliverables, ensuring alignment with business objectives.
The Tech Lead ensures technical coherence, facilitates code reviews, and drives architectural decisions. They uphold code quality and guide developers on best practices and established standards.
The development team comprises back-end and front-end developers, a UI/UX designer, and a QA engineer. This mix of profiles covers all necessary skills to deliver a robust, user-focused product.
Tech Stack and Tooling Choices
The tech stack selection must address performance, scalability, and security requirements. Open-source, modular, non-blocking solutions are often favored to avoid vendor lock-in and facilitate scalability.
Common technologies include non-blocking JavaScript frameworks for the back end, modern libraries for the front end, and both SQL and NoSQL databases tailored to business needs. Container orchestration and CI/CD pipelines enable fast, reliable delivery.
For example, a Ticino-based e-commerce SME chose a stack built on a non-blocking JavaScript runtime and a modular framework. This configuration cut deployment time in half and strengthened infrastructure resilience—demonstrating the concrete impact of a stack aligned with business needs.
From SDLC to MVP: Take Action Today
Structuring your SDLC, distinguishing POC, prototype, and MVP, and choosing the right execution model are all levers to accelerate your launch. Implementing an Agile/Scrum framework with a scalable, secure stack reduces risks and maximizes value at every iteration.
Every startup is unique: contextual expertise is key to adapting these principles to your specific challenges—whether time, budget, or technical complexity.
Our experts are available to guide you through defining your software development strategy, from initial scoping to MVP deployment and beyond. Together, let’s turn your ideas into fast, reliable operational solutions.
