How can you test hypotheses about your product?
Product Management
Perspectives from experts about the questions that matter in Product Management
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As a product manager, you're often responsible for envisioning and shaping the direction of your product. That requires making assumptions and hypotheses about what it should do, who it should serve and what needs it should meet. But simply making assumptions isn't enough. You’ll need to test those hypotheses in order to ensure they're accurate and that they contribute to a successful product. Here’s how product managers can begin to validate their assumptions around their product.?
1. Conduct customer research: One of the most important ways to test your assumptions is by talking to the customers you're building your product for. Conduct customer research to learn more about their needs, behaviors and expectations. Gathering such information can help confirm whether your assumptions align with what customers actually want.
2. Run experiments: Consider running A/B tests or other types of experiments to see how users respond to different versions of your product. Look for conclusive results that either confirm or refute your initial hypotheses, and use that information to refine your approach.
"Build design prototypes or even wireframes and go back to those customers and run these through them again. Sometimes the use cases may communicate a different idea but when they see how this is going to look in the product, their thought processes are likely to change."
— Shankar Viswanathan is a senior principal product manager at ServiceNow. He holds over 20 years of experience in product and project management, and earned his master's in industrial management from the Indian Institute of Technology.
"Running short, concise paid ads pilots with the same targeting for the same audience demographics is a good way to see how new features are perceived and adopted."
— Liudmila Kiseleva is the CEO of machine learning technology company QRate. She holds over 15 years of experience in entrepreneurship and marketing and earned her master's in analytics from the Kogod School of Business at American University.
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3. Assess market trends: Keep a pulse on market trends in your industry to spot any potential risks or opportunities that could impact your initial assumptions. For example, if you're building an application for a specific platform, you'd want to be aware of any news or changes related to that platform that could affect your product's potential success.?
4. Check in with your team: As you're working on your product, make sure to check in with your development and marketing teams to ensure everyone is aligned. They may be able to offer critical feedback, data or perspectives that you hadn't yet considered, which you can use to reexamine your hypotheses.
5. Keep iterating: Finally, remember that you don't have to get everything right the first time. Product development is an iterative process, which means you have the opportunity to learn and adjust as you go. As you work on your product, continue to test different hypotheses in order to learn more and create the best possible product for your customers.
"[...] Follow a product design philosophy which lets you do rapid prototyping, followed by a product development lifecycle based on "fail fast" - get ideas in front of test groups and see what sticks, what needs refining, and what just needs to go away. [...] It should be a cycle. Hypothesize, design the test, conduct the test, and refine or eliminate the hypothesis, and repeat!"
— Erik Boemanns has been the vice president of technology at IT consulting firm Improving for the past 10 years. He has over 16 years of experience in the technology industry and earned his J.D. from Georgia State University College of Law.
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This article was edited by LinkedIn News Editor Felicia Hou and was curated leveraging the help of AI technology.
Engineering Leadership at Walmart | Ex-Meta, Ex-Apple
2 年Doing high fidelity mocks and doing research based on them is one of the way I have seen we can test hypotheses and get some quick feedback without having to write a single line of code.
CEO | COO | Passionate Executive | Entrepreneur | Board Member | General Management | Sporting goods | Consumer goods | Global brands | MBA | Outdoor enthusiast
2 年I would also recommend to every product manager to try and be a passionate consumer and user of that product or service he is trying to develop. This means real knowledge of the market, trends, consumers' needs, and access to communities, opinion leaders to gather further feedback.
Senior Product Manager-VR Platform at Axon| Deliver best VR core CX
2 年Finding the balance between imagination and reality is always one of the biggest challenges of product management. Too close to reality, there will be no groundbreaking improvement, too aggressive to the imagination, users will be flying in the air. Product managers have limited time to prove the assumption. we need to efficiently test, educate the pilot users, explore as many angles as possible and respond with the right decisions. Sometimes, even need to prepare "fail fast" to save up time and resources.
Listen to your marketing, sales and CS teams. They are on the frontlines and have a good sense for what features work and/or what is missing. I find it helpful to work with the Head of Sales to require a "Reason for Lost Deal" field to help understand where the product could do better.
As a rule of thumb, I always rely on 3 or 4 inputs before I make a product decision. A lot of times customers can't really formalize exactly what they want in a product but as you listen to different customers you generally start to see similar requirements.