— How we work

The six-week MVP cadence, and what we cut to keep it.

Two-week design sprint, four-week build sprint, hard scope freeze on week three. The studio promises six weeks because every cut is decided before we start, not during.

4 min readPublished 2026-04-16By AptixLabs studio
A whiteboard during a sprint planning session, representing the six-week MVP cadenceAptixLabs · 2026-04-16

The studio's default MVP cadence is six weeks from kickoff to a TestFlight build a partner can hand to their first real users. Six weeks is honest because the studio cuts ruthlessly to keep it.

Week 1–2 — Design sprint

Workshops, interviews, a clickable Figma prototype. The outcome of week two is a single confident spec: what's in, what's out, what the success metric is. No engineering until the spec is signed.

Week 3 — Scope freeze

Anything that surfaces after week three goes to a "next sprint" list, not into scope. This is the rule that makes six weeks honest. Every studio that misses MVP deadlines does so because scope crept after the start.

Week 3–6 — Build

Production code from sprint one — no throwaway prototypes. Each fortnight ends with a demo build the partner can install. The cadence forces ugly truths to surface early: if a flow doesn't feel right on day 10, we still have time to change it.

What we cut to keep the deadline

  • Settings screens — defaults that work for 80% of users, defer the rest
  • Onboarding videos — they take longer than the feature they explain
  • Edge-case empty states — ship with placeholder, polish in sprint 2
  • Admin tooling — Firestore console + a one-off CLI gets us through launch
  • Analytics dashboards — Firebase Analytics + BigQuery for the first month, custom later

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