How a 3-Person Startup Reaches MVP Faster with Lean Inception and Reusable Packages

Organize your team, project and life.

Michael Machado, founder of Devtype, draws on his postgraduate Software Engineering studies at PUC-RJ to improve his three-person company’s workflow. He reports that structured planning before drawing architecture diagrams significantly accelerates MVP delivery.

Why This Matters

The technical reality for small teams is that unstructured planning leads to wasted effort and delayed MVPs, while idealized models like endless architectural diagrams can be counterproductive before validating customer requirements. Devtype’s experience shows that investing time upfront in lean inception and building reusable packages across 5 domains (backend basics, bank integration, authentication, WhatsApp) directly increases maintainability and speeds delivery without stiffening workflow.

Key Insights

• Lean inception before architecture: Machado advocates for gathering customer requirements and holding a lean inception session before drawing class or system diagrams — this shortcut to MVP prevents building on unvalidated ideas.
• Reusable support toolkit: Devtype created backend basic tools for database connection, AWS integration, queue consumer/producer, logs, and cryptography, used across all applications to ensure consistency and maintainability.
• Domain-specific packages: The company built packages for bank integration, authentication, WhatsApp integration, and more — turning development into a pattern-driven process that avoids workflow rigidity.
• Jira + weekly sprints: After several projects, the team adopted Jira for project management and a weekly cadence, which helped define tasks and deadlines to run faster and better.

Practical Applications

• Use case: Devtype + lean inception — conducts requirements chat and planning sessions before any diagramming to validate assumptions early. Pitfall: Skipping this step leads to premature system design based on untested ideas, wasting engineering effort on wrong architectures.
• Use case: Devtype + reusable toolkit — maintains a shared library of backend fundamentals (DB, AWS, queues, logs, crypto) for consistent implementation. Pitfall: Over-engineering or under-documenting shared packages can introduce rigidity, making them hard to adapt for new project needs.
• Use case: Devtype + Jira + weekly sprints — uses task tracking and scheduled planning to clarify deadlines and reduce workflow overwhelm. Pitfall: Without flexibility, fixed sprints can become a bureaucratic overhead for a 3-person team, stifling rapid iteration.

References:

• https://dev.to/machadomichael/organize-your-team-project-and-life-lgf