How to define breadth vs depth in your MVP strategy
In emerging sectors like the creator economy, product leaders face a unique challenge: building for users whose workflows aren’t standardized and often defy simple templates. Unlike mature verticals like accounting or HR where decades of established processes shape how teams operate, there’s no clear blueprint to follow here, no dominant legacy software to learn from, and no single “source of truth” for how things should get done.
That’s both a blessing and a curse. The absence of legacy constraints opens the door for meaningful innovation and creates room to break in, but it demands sharper judgment from product leaders: G go too broad and you lose relevance to generic existing tools; go too narrow and you risk missing critical workflows and key user segments.
Why fragmentation makes MVPs harder
In mature industries, product teams benefit from clear precedents and standardized user processes. For example, an accounting SaaS like QuickBooks can draw on decades of well-defined bookkeeping practices, tax codes, and consistent user expectations—there’s an established baseline process to digitize and improve.
In contrast, emerging industries are fundamentally fragmented: No two users work exactly the same way, and many don’t yet have an “ideal workflow” in mind. The creator economy is a prime example of this and I see this daily in my product work, where our clients include major record labels, agencies, and brands running thousands of creator campaigns worldwide. Some teams rely solely on Excel to organize their campaigns, while others have built intricate Airtable systems and many juggle multiple SaaS tools with countless manual workarounds.
When workflows are this fragmented, even within similar user segments, building an MVP becomes a balancing act. Too much breadth, and you risk blending in with generic tools like spreadsheets or Airtable, losing the value of building something truly tailored. Too much narrowness, and your product won’t support the real-life scenarios that actually drive adoption and retention for most users. For product teams, this makes user discovery and prioritization uniquely challenging: You’re not just digitizing an existing process, but often defining what “standard” should look like in the first place.
Map the real mess, not just the ideal
Before envisioning the “ideal” product, it’s critical to first understand how users actually get work done today. In a landscape where user processes vary widely, surface-level interviews or surveys won’t suffice. You need to observe and dig deeper to truly understand how work is done on a day-to-day basis.
Users are often eager to walk you through their real processes and show you the patchwork solutions they’ve hacked together. Encourage them to vent their frustrations and highlight pain points, describing workarounds that slow them down and tools they wish worked better.
These candid conversations reveal the real obstacles your product should address. From here, you can start to spot overlapping pain points and recurring patterns. This grounded understanding of how users actually work helps you stay rooted in reality and avoid building features for an idealized, nonexistent, workflow.
Prioritize for adoption, not perfect coverage
When learning about these diverse workflows from users, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by feature ideas, requests, and edge cases. It’s tempting to keep your product broad to cover every possible scenario and win over every user, but trying to serve all of the distinct workflows simply recreates the very chaos that your product is supposed to simplify.
A strong MVP needs to feel purpose-built and tailored enough to your target groups that they see a compelling reason to use your product. The key is striking a balance between focus and flexibility. Within your core audience, prioritize solving their most prominent, shared pain points first and let any niche needs wait until there’s more traction.
Sometimes this means saying no to good feature ideas if they don’t align with early adoption priorities. Feedback from users will naturally reveal what’s working, what’s missing, and what needs to be expanded or made customizable down the line. These initial guardrails help avoid overengineering and keep your product lean, clear, and focused.
For instance, at CreatorCore, we added a preset automation layer on top of our core campaign management tool. It covered the repetitive steps most users faced, even though it didn’t perfectly match every team’s custom workflow. By solving the bulk of common pain points first, we made the product valuable for the widest segment while leaving room for future customization.
In the end, a successful MVP isn’t about doing everything. It’s about doing the right things well enough that people choose you over the patchwork they’re stuck with today, and stick with you as you grow alongside them.
Keep feedback loops tight
Launching your initial product is just the beginning. In spaces where user needs are diverse and constantly evolving, your roadmap works best when it remains flexible and is shaped by real-time feedback from those who are actually using the product. Whenever possible, involve the daily operators and end users who live inside the product, not just the decision-makers paying for it (users vs. customers).
It’s easy to drift into assumptions when moving fast, and even a well-thought-out product strategy can miss critical considerations in fragmented markets. As a product leader, it’s crucial to establish regular touchpoints with users and have a feedback system involving relevant stakeholders who work closely with your users, including account executives, customer success teams, and/or sales teams. Staying close to users helps catch unexpected friction points and shifting needs long before they become blockers.
For instance, we established a system to personally check in with clients following major launches, introducing new features live, observing how they used them, and quickly shipping hotfixes when needed. With this system in place, each launch became a natural touchpoint to deepen trust and spot gaps early.
Takeaway
Building in an emerging industry highlights the importance of core product principles. You can’t build for every scenario, so ground your solutions in how users really work, go deep where it matters most, and stay focused on early priorities with enough flexibility to adapt and scale over time.
If there’s one thing to remember, it’s this: there’s no perfect MVP. There’s only an MVP that’s clear enough, focused enough, and adaptable enough to earn trust, drive adoption, and evolve alongside your users.
And for the teams that get this right, the payoff is real: define the standard, and you’re not just building software but shaping what best practice looks like and influencing how an entire industry operates.
About the author
Sol Lee
Sol is the founding product manager at CreatorCore, where she leads end-to-end product strategy, design, and delivery of products powering multi-million dollar creator operations for top media and entertainment clients. A former founder with experience in product, design, and engineering, she builds innovative, scalable solutions for emerging industries.
