Ship an Agent MVP in 4 Weeks
Week-by-week plan from idea to paying pilot customer.
Week 1: Workflow map
Before writing code, shadow the manual process for 2-3 days. Document every input the human uses, every decision they make, every system they touch, and every output they produce. Include edge cases - what happens when data is missing, when the customer is angry, when the policy is ambiguous.
Then cut ruthlessly. Your MVP covers one happy path that delivers 80% of the value. If the full workflow has 12 steps, your MVP handles the 5 most common. Edge cases get manual fallback, not automated handling.
Deliverable: a one-page workflow diagram with inputs, agent steps, tool calls, human checkpoints, and outputs. Share it with your design partner and ask: 'If the agent handled these 5 steps reliably, would you pay for a pilot?' Their answer determines whether you build.
Weeks 2-3: Build the loop
Week 2: authentication, one core integration (the system your agent reads from most), basic agent loop (prompt + 2-3 tools), and a minimal UI that shows input and output. No polish - function over form.
Week 3: add RAG or additional tools, implement the human approval step, and dogfood internally with 10 real examples from your design partner. Target 'works correctly for 10 real examples' not 'handles every possible input.' Measure completion rate on those 10 examples daily.
Resist feature creep. The most common Week 3 mistake is adding a second workflow before the first one works. If your ticket triage agent handles 7/10 examples correctly, fix those 3 failures before adding email drafting. Completion on one workflow beats partial coverage of three.
5 more sections in this article
- Week 4: Pilot
- What to cut to make four weeks real
- The integration that will slip
- What week five looks like
- Worked example: the ticket triage agent
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Published 27 July 2026. Last reviewed 17 August 2026. We re-read this library on a schedule and date every article, so you can see for yourself how current it is.