How do you validate and test product requirements and specifications before and after development?

Begin by gaining a deep understanding of your target audience and the needs of key stakeholders. This knowledge forms the foundation for defining requirements that are aligned with user expectations and business objectives.

Its is vital to spend time with customers and stakeholders to objectively understand their pain points. Focus discovery on what motivative the users, is your product a good to have vs must have, do users say one thing but act differently etc. You should also find signal around - what they did not say eg, a user may not explicitly tell you that they forget to do a certain action

Clearly articulate your product requirements and specifications. Prioritize them based on importance and relevance to the overall goals of the project. This helps in focusing efforts on critical features and functionalities.

Prioritization is one of the key skills you need to develop as a product management professional. Specifically focus on solving or trying to solve the crux of the problem i.e. the user behavior you want to influence. More often than not you will have constraints - either time, resources, engineers so be extremely deliberate on what you want to build and test. Find creative ways to test user flows and focus on quick turn around to maximize learning

Prototyping is a miracle ! More often than not, you can do smoke tests as well as get enough signal to double-down or pivot by building low-medium fidelity prototypes. Depending on the stage of the company you should test your hypothesis of customer needs by running experiments, getting qualitative data from users etc. The primary purpose of this stage is to learn at an accelerated pace.

Create prototypes or conduct experiments to validate the feasibility and desirability of your requirements. This can involve building mockups, conducting usability tests, or running pilot studies to gather feedback early in the development process.

Most requirement gathering is an iterative process. That said, this is the time to be comprehensive; the previous steps are less penalizing in terms of effort as most are low fidelity. Here, you need to start having opinions around throughputs (eg, will this be used by thousands or millions of users). This will help the engineering team design the product in the right way. This is also the time to understand the dependency graph on what is the sequence of steps that need to happen for a successful launch.

Requirements can change-- the last thing you want to do is build a product and put a ton of hours into it when you're heading in the right direction. If you're shipping for a client than be in communication with them. If you're building to address a problem in the market, keep tabs on the tech/news around that problem so you can continue to differentiate your solution from others.

Maintain an iterative approach to development, continuously reviewing and refining requirements as the project progresses. Regularly engage with the development team, stakeholders, and end-users to ensure that the evolving product aligns with expectations.

Conduct thorough testing to ensure that the developed product meets the defined requirements. This includes functional testing, performance testing, security testing, and any other relevant testing methodologies. Automated testing tools can be employed to streamline the testing process and identify potential issues.

Testing is a very important step in the product development process. It helps in identifying issues in terms of product functionality, integrations as well the product specification. Always remember, it is FAR easier to resolve an issue before it is launched to a customer. Do not be in a hurry to ship a bad experience to a customer.

In testing, a robust risk management framework is indispensable. Categorize risks based on severity and likelihood, allocating resources efficiently. Implementing this framework enhances the testing process by focusing on high-impact risks and having contingency plans for potential issues, ultimately ensuring the product's reliability and performance. Building on effective communication channels is crucial for issue resolution. In addition to reporting, establish clear protocols for swift issue escalation and resolution. Seamless information flow between teams and stakeholders minimizes the impact of challenges. Proactive communication becomes a cornerstone in maintaining the reliability and performance of the product post-development.

Once you got enough sense that your customers will buy your product before developing, the product launch itself should show some positive gains. The difference after launch is how well the quality and marketing of the product went. The quality will test whether you listened to user feedback in the prototype stage and eased their concerns on the proper product launch.

Identify steps to handle problems like bugs or when things don't go as expected. Come up with steps and plans to get things back on track. Setup effective communication channels between internal teams and stakeholders for reporting and addressing issues promptly.

Once the product is launched, gather data on its performance and monitor customer satisfaction. This involves analyzing user feedback, tracking key performance indicators (KPIs), and identifying areas for improvement. Use this post-launch evaluation to inform future updates, enhancements, or iterations of the product.