Strategic Testing ideas early allows us to do the least amount of work and spend the least amount of time and money—to see if something is a good idea. The less we invest, the less we get attached to an idea, and the easier it is to try something different or change direction if needed.
Imagine you or your team just launched a new product or service. You spent time and energy building it, invested money, and had multiple resources involved. A lot is at stake. You release it, and no one is buying it or using it in an intended way. It is devastating and discouraging but could easily be avoided if we had tested our ideas earlier.
I want to share a simple, repeatable process for testing and learning you can use in organizations of all sizes and types, from startups to large enterprises.
Strategic Testing: Continuous Learning Process
Step 1: Run a Research Kickoff Workshop, which will help you put together a testing plan
Step 2: Perform Tests. Perform tests and summarize all that you learned.
Step 3: Go back to see what questions you have or what you still need to learn.
You may ask when the right time to start learning is? Ideally, you would begin in the discovery stage. But it's not too late to test and learn if you are already in the middle of the project. Maybe you're building a new feature for your product—you could start validating with customers to ensure you're going in the right direction. Or, if you just delivered a product or service and no one is using it, think about some tests you could run to learn how you might redesign your product.
1. Research Kickoff Workshop
The research kickoff workshop is usually a 60-minute collaborative and interactive workshop. To run it, you need:
A diverse group of participants involved in the project. Having a diverse group is essential for this exercise because it brings different perspectives and helps you think out of the box—strategy is collaborative. Don't do it by yourself.
Video conference call if you cannot do it in person.
Sticky notes or a whiteboarding tool. We use virtual whiteboarding tools called Mural or Miro for remote sessions. If you don't want to pay for a whiteboarding tool, use Google Slides.
Workshop Structure
Reflect as a team on what you know and still need to understand by brainstorming assumptions and questions about your project.
Look closely into each assumption or question and rate it on two scales: certain/uncertain and high/low risk. Think about risk in terms of what is at stake if you are wrong. Does your entire business depend on this? Is this something that will require a lot of time and money?
Select all the assumptions and questions that are high-risk and uncertain and create an action plan to resolve them.
If you want to try this workshop in Mural, we have a template you can use (Research Kickoff Mural Template).
2. Strategic Testing and Learning
Every experiment will reduce the risk of spending time, energy, and money on ideas that won't work.
Start with cheap fast tests to learn quickly. Every test will reduce the risk that you'll spend time, energy, and money on ideas that won't work.
Interview a small set of customers to understand their desire to use your product or service and gauge their reactions to the idea.
Sketch out rough screens of the app and share them with potential customers for feedback.
Interviews with developers to determine a range of costs to build the app.
3. Repeat
Step three in the process is looping back to the assumptions and questions after strategic testing and learning. What questions do you still have, or what do you still want to know? Maybe you've validated that customers would be interested in your app. Now you might want to dive deeper and run more tests.
This process is excellent to get you going and into a continuous learning mind. The more you know about your audience, the better strategy you will have!
Are you interested in learning more about the Strategic Testing Process?
Learn more about our strategic testing course.