At the risk of sounding like an HN pedant, your questions are backwards. To make sound engineering trade-offs you need to understand the problem. I would start

At the risk of sounding like an HN pedant, your questions are backwards. To make sound engineering trade-offs you need to understand the problem. I would start with questions like the following: 1.) What market are you targeting and what are the overall user expectations for features, quality, reliability, etc.? 2.) What is the minimum viable feature set (i.e., product) to get into that market? 3.) Is it more important to be fast to market or the best to market? Products are built iteratively. Even if it's OK to deliver on the fast and crappy model you still need a path to fix things incrementally. This applies to just about every product I've ever seen.