How do you measure when your product is successful? To call your product truly successful, it should help your customers solve a specific problem. But how do you measure that? That’s where product validation comes into the picture. Here are some different ways you can go about validating that your product does what you set out to do so that you can truly claim success.
Validated learning. “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.” There’s no progress, no growth, no improvement without learning, so any development endeavor that seeks to be better/faster/more must include learning in its process. When you take a lean startup approach to developing your product, validated learning is that part of the process where you learn just how close your product is to satisfying your customers. Dave Foxall explains what validated learning is and how you can use it to know when your product is truly doing what you set out to do.
(via @boldarecom)
Hypothesis driven validation. Hypothesis driven validation helps your team validate your product by identifying specific risks with your product and addressing them. Nate Archer introduces hypothesis driven validation, describes how to do it, and explains why it is important to extract hypotheses as early as possible and use them to structure all other activities.
(via @natearcher)
Continuous validation: Staying in touch with your market. “Validation is always a temporary state. Your business can be validated only ‘for the time being.’ Competition, a changing regulatory landscape, human error, bad press, changing preferences can always derail a working business.” That’s why Arvid Kahl believes businesses should practice continuous validation. “Regularly and frequently, assess where you are in terms of still being in touch with the market. Are you still solving their most painful problem? Did that change? Are there new issues that you didn’t encounter before? That will keep you on your toes. And your customers happy.”
(via @arvidkahl)
How Uniregistry used smoke testing in product validation. “More than two-thirds of software projects fail to deliver expected results. As a result, the team at Uniregistry decided to take a new approach to product validation in an attempt to avoid the same fate.” Bartosz Mozyrko explains how the team used smoke tests to validate their product and explore a new opportunity.
(via @bmozyrko)
9 Proven ways to validate your digital product idea in 2020. “Is there anything worse than putting your sweat and blood in creating a product that never takes off, fails to attract buyers, and turns your hard work into a laughing stock?” Before investing hours and hours of hard work into a new product, you should find out if people want it in the first place. Sam with WebGrowthBoss.com explains an approach to validate your product idea in the context of online courses. The advice in this article will (hopefully) help you avoid the horrors of a failed product launch.
(via @webgrowthboss)
