Company Context

PennyPath is a Series A fintech startup with 1.5M registered users across its savings and bill-tracking products. The company has strong engagement in basic money management but has not yet launched a full budgeting product, while competitors like Rocket Money and YNAB are gaining share with more opinionated planning tools.

Problem

PennyPath plans to launch a new mobile budgeting product for young professionals aged 22-35. Early research shows strong demand, but the team has capacity to build only a limited MVP in the next 12 weeks. User interviews surfaced several feature requests: automatic transaction categorization, goal-based budgeting, subscription tracking, shared household budgets, spending insights, bill reminders, credit score monitoring, and AI-based savings recommendations.

Leadership wants the MVP to improve 8-week retention for new budgeting users from a projected 22% baseline to at least 32%, while also creating a path to paid conversion later. Engineering estimates the full feature list would take 8 months, but the company needs an MVP in market this quarter to validate product-market fit.

Deliverables

1. Define the target user segment and their highest-priority job to be done.
2. Propose a framework for prioritizing the candidate features for MVP.
3. Recommend which features should be included in the first release, deferred, or excluded.
4. Explain the key trade-offs across user value, business impact, complexity, and speed to launch.
5. Define how you would measure whether the MVP is successful.

Constraints

• MVP must launch within 12 weeks.
• Team capacity: 4 engineers, 1 designer, 1 data analyst.
• No new paid data partnerships can be signed before launch.
• Product must support both iOS and Android at launch.
• Compliance review adds 2 weeks for any feature involving credit data or personalized financial advice.