What Should Your First App Sprint Actually Include?

Most app projects stumble right at the starting line because the first sprint tries to do everything at once, teams pack in features they won't need for months, and what should be a focused two-week effort turns into a chaotic scramble that sets the wrong tone for the entire project. The fact is that your first sprint shapes how your entire development process will unfold, it sets expectations with stakeholders, establishes your team's rhythm, and proves whether your initial assumptions about the project actually hold up when you start building.

The first sprint should prove that your core idea works, not showcase every feature you'll eventually build

After a decade of building apps across healthcare, finance, and retail, I've watched countless first sprints go wrong in the same predictable ways, and the projects that succeed early almost always follow the same pattern... they focus on proving one thing works really well rather than trying to show progress on everything at once. Your first sprint isn't about impressing anyone with how much you can build, it's about establishing a solid foundation that you can actually build on top of without having to tear everything down and start again three months later.

Understanding What a Sprint Actually Means

A sprint is simply a fixed period of time where your development team works on a specific set of tasks that you've agreed on beforehand, nothing gets added once you start, nothing gets removed unless something goes seriously wrong, and at the end you should have working features that someone can actually test and use. Most teams work in two-week sprints because it's long enough to build something real but short enough that you can change direction quickly if you need to.

The whole point of working in sprints is that you can respond to what you learn as you go. You're not locked into a six-month plan that becomes outdated after the first month. Each sprint should end with working software that you can put in front of users, get feedback on, and use to inform what you build in the next sprint.

The biggest confusion I see with first sprints is teams thinking they need to build fully polished features right from the start, when really you're trying to prove that your basic approach works before you invest time making everything perfect. A working login screen that looks basic is infinitely more valuable than a beautifully designed login screen that doesn't actually connect to your authentication system yet.

Setting Clear Goals for Your First Sprint

Your first sprint needs one clear question it's trying to answer, something like "can users create an account and complete their first core action" or "does our payment flow work end to end without errors"... if you can't state your sprint goal in one sentence then you're probably trying to do too much. I worked on a fintech app where our entire first sprint goal was proving we could securely connect to the bank API and display account balances, that's it, no transfers, no budgeting features, just proving the fundamental connection worked.

Write your sprint goal on a sticky note and put it somewhere your whole team can see it every day, if a task doesn't directly support that goal then it shouldn't be in this sprint

The goals you set need to be things you can actually test and verify at the end of the sprint. "Build the user profile section" isn't specific enough, but "users can create a profile with photo, name, and bio, and view it on a separate screen" gives you something concrete to aim for and demo when the sprint ends.

The Core Features That Should Make the Cut

Your first sprint should focus on what I call the "spine" of your app, the absolute minimum path a user needs to take to get value from what you're building... if you're building a food delivery app, that spine is searching for restaurants, selecting items, and placing an order, not loyalty programmes or saved favourites or restaurant ratings. Everything else can wait.

User Entry and Authentication

Most apps need some way for users to get in, whether that's creating an account or logging in with an existing one, but your first sprint version can be incredibly simple... email and password is fine, you don't need social logins or two-factor authentication or password strength indicators yet. I've seen teams spend half their first sprint building complex authentication flows when a basic email signup would have done the job and let them move on to features that actually differentiate their app.

The Single Core Action

Every app has one thing it does that provides value to users, for Instagram it's posting a photo, for Uber it's requesting a ride, for a banking app it's checking your balance... your first sprint needs to prove that this one core action works. When we built a healthcare booking app, our entire first sprint was just letting users see available appointment slots and book one, no cancellations, no reminders, no practitioner profiles, just the booking itself.

• Basic navigation between screens
• Data display for your core content (products, posts, appointments, whatever your app shows)
• One input method (form, search, or selection)
• Confirmation that an action completed
• Error handling for the most common failure points

What Definitely Shouldn't Be in Sprint One

The features that kill first sprints are always the same ones... teams want to add notifications because they seem simple, or polish the onboarding because first impressions matter, or build settings screens because users will need them eventually. The problem is that none of these features help you prove whether your core idea actually works, they're all supporting features for an app that doesn't properly exist yet.

If a feature is about improving the experience rather than creating the experience, it doesn't belong in your first sprint

Push notifications require certificates, testing across devices, writing compelling copy, and building the backend infrastructure to trigger and track them... that's easily three days of work that could be spent making sure your actual features work properly. I watched a retail app team spend their entire first sprint building a beautiful onboarding flow with animated illustrations, then realised in sprint two that their product catalogue loaded too slowly and had to rethink their whole data structure.

Features That Can Wait

Social sharing sounds simple but it means handling different platforms, preview images, deep linking back into your app, and tracking which shares lead to installs. Password reset flows involve email templates, token generation, expiry handling, and edge cases like what happens if someone requests multiple resets. Detailed analytics need tracking libraries, event definitions, privacy compliance, and dashboards to view the data... none of this helps you learn whether your core product idea resonates with users.

Settings screens are particularly tempting because they feel like housekeeping you should get out of the way early, but they're really just a collection of features that don't exist yet... notification preferences for notifications you haven't built, privacy controls for data you're not collecting, account management for edge cases you haven't encountered. Build the thing first, then build the controls for the thing.

Building Your Minimum Viable Product Right

A proper MVP isn't about building a rough version of your final app, it's about building the smallest possible thing that lets real users do something genuinely useful, even if it's a narrow version of what you eventually plan to offer. Understanding what makes an MVP different from a prototype is crucial at this stage, as it helps you focus on delivering value rather than just demonstrating concepts. The healthcare app I mentioned earlier launched with just one clinic's appointments available, no search, no filters, no multiple locations... but patients could book appointments which was the whole point, and we learned more from those first hundred bookings than we would have from six months of planning.

The trick is working out what "viable" actually means for your specific app, which depends entirely on your users and what alternative they're currently using. If people are booking appointments by phone, then an app that only works during office hours is fine because it's still better than calling... but if they're used to booking on a competitor's app at midnight, then your MVP needs to work round the clock or they won't bother switching. When deciding on your approach, you'll also need to consider whether to build your MVP as a native app or web app based on your specific requirements and constraints.

1. List every feature you think your app needs
2. Circle the three features that deliver the core value
3. Cross out any feature that supports or improves those three rather than creating value itself
4. Take what's left and cut it in half
5. That's your first sprint scope

Technical Decisions for Your MVP

Your first sprint is not the time to build custom solutions for problems that existing tools solve perfectly well, authentication libraries exist, payment SDKs exist, image handling packages exist... use them unless you have a genuinely unusual requirement that demands custom code. I've seen teams spend weeks building custom image cropping tools when the standard library would have worked fine, or creating bespoke analytics when existing solutions offered more than they needed.

The technical architecture you choose in sprint one will affect you for months afterwards, so this is the one area where you do need to think a bit longer term even if you're not building long term features yet. Choosing a database that can't scale, picking a state management approach that breaks down with complex screens, or structuring your API in a way that requires major changes later... these decisions are much harder to fix than adding features you skipped in sprint one. For healthcare apps specifically, you'll need to factor in how compliance requirements affect your technical choices and budget even from the very first sprint.

Planning Your Sprint Timeline and Resources

Two weeks is the standard sprint length because it gives you enough time to build something real but keeps the feedback loop tight enough that you're not working for ages on something that turns out to be wrong. Some teams try one-week sprints for their first few cycles, which can work if you're really disciplined about scope, but it often just means you're spending half your time in planning meetings rather than building.

Block out the last day of your sprint for testing and fixing, not for cramming in one more feature... you want to end each sprint with working software, not software that's 95% done but crashes when you test it

Your team size makes a huge difference to what you can achieve in a first sprint, a solo developer might only manage one major feature plus basic navigation and data handling, while a team of four could build out multiple user flows and have time left for polish. The mistake I see is teams planning sprints based on calendar time rather than available development hours... two weeks with a developer who's splitting time across projects is not the same as two weeks of focused work. If you're building specialised features like smartwatch integration, you might also need to consider whether you need additional team expertise for wearable apps even in your first sprint.

Managing Dependencies and Blockers

The things that derail first sprints usually aren't coding problems, they're waiting for API access, getting approval for app store accounts, receiving design assets, or sorting out hosting environments. Map out everything your team needs before sprint one starts, not just what they need to build but what they need access to, and get those dependencies sorted in advance or you'll spend half your sprint waiting around. Before you launch, make sure you understand what legal requirements your MVP needs to meet to avoid last-minute compliance issues.

Testing and Feedback During Your First Sprint

Testing in sprint one means checking that features actually work, not that they work perfectly in every possible scenario or handle every edge case gracefully... you're looking for broken flows, crashes, and obvious bugs, not polish issues or minor visual glitches. When we build the first sprint, we test on two devices per platform maximum, usually the most common iPhone and Android models, because testing on twenty different screen sizes just finds problems you don't have time to fix yet.

The best feedback loop in a first sprint is daily check-ins where anyone can open the current build and see what's actually working, this catches misunderstandings early when they're easy to fix rather than at the end of the sprint when you'd need to redo half the work. I worked on an e-commerce app where the team built a beautiful product grid for five days before anyone actually loaded it with realistic data and realised the images took fifteen seconds to appear... daily testing would have caught that on day one.

Who Should Test Your First Sprint

Your first sprint output should only be tested by your immediate team and maybe one or two friendly users who understand they're seeing something rough, not by your full user base or stakeholders who expect a polished experience. The goal is finding things that don't work, not gathering opinions on design choices or feature requests for things you haven't built yet.

End users get involved after sprint two or three when you have enough working features that their feedback will be about the product rather than just about missing functionality... showing someone an app with two screens and asking what they think is pointless because they'll just tell you about all the screens you haven't built yet rather than whether the screens you have actually solve their problem. This is also when you might want to start building your email list for the eventual launch, as you'll have something concrete to show potential users.

Common First Sprint Mistakes to Avoid

The biggest mistake is treating your first sprint like a showcase where you need to demonstrate progress to stakeholders rather than a learning exercise where you prove your assumptions... this leads to teams building the most visually impressive features instead of the most important ones, or spending time on polish when functionality is still broken. I've watched teams demo beautiful loading animations while their actual data fetching was failing half the time.

Scope creep in the first sprint sets a precedent that every sprint can expand, destroying your ability to plan anything reliably

Adding features mid-sprint happens when someone has a "quick idea" that seems easy to slot in, but every addition pushes something else back and suddenly your sprint goal isn't met because you spent two days on a feature that wasn't part of the plan. The whole point of sprint planning is that you commit to a scope and protect it, if something new comes up that's genuinely urgent then you remove something of equal size, not just pile more work onto your team.

Technical Mistakes That Hurt Later

Skipping proper version control setup because you're in a hurry is a mistake that will cost you within weeks when you need to track down when a bug was introduced or roll back a change that broke something. Not setting up a proper development environment separate from production means you're testing on live systems, which is fine until you accidentally delete real data or push broken code to actual users.

Hardcoding values that should be configurable seems faster in the moment but means you need to rebuild and resubmit your app every time you want to change something simple like an API endpoint or feature flag. Building everything in one massive file or function rather than organising code into logical modules makes it nearly impossible for anyone else to work on the codebase, and even you'll struggle to find things after a few weeks away from the code. If you're considering modern development approaches, you should also understand the cost implications of different coding approaches before committing to your technical stack.

Conclusion

Your first sprint sets the rhythm and expectations for your entire project, so getting it right means being ruthlessly focused on proving that your core idea works rather than trying to show progress across every feature you'll eventually build. The apps that succeed are built by teams that can ship working software consistently, learn from what they've built, and adjust their plans based on real usage rather than assumptions... and that discipline starts with how you approach sprint one.

The difference between a first sprint that energises your team and one that leaves everyone feeling behind schedule comes down to whether you planned for what two weeks can actually achieve, not what you wish it could achieve. Strip out everything that isn't directly proving your core value, test constantly throughout the sprint rather than leaving it until the end, and finish with working software that's basic but functional rather than impressive features that are almost done but don't quite work yet.

If you're planning your first sprint and want someone to help you work out what should actually be in it based on what we've learned from building apps over the past ten years, get in touch and we can walk through your specific project together.

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