Completing tests quickly will help you run multiple tests in succession
Your success will be a function of the learning cycles you fit into your runway. — Tom Hulme, Ideo
The best way to discover what makes your prospects tick is to run an experiment. If you are pressed for time, the best way to discover what makes them buy is to run many experiments over a very short time period.
Assuming these two would cost exactly the same amount, which would be more valuable to you as a product manager?
1 test, which runs for one week, which gives you 99% certainty on your results
30 tests, which take one hour each, with 90% certainty each
Clearly the second set of tests is much more valuable. When you finish the first test, you can form another hypothesis and test that. One set of results directly feeds into the rest. If you want to identify surprising results quickly, as this is most likely to give you outsized results, option B is a much better way to enter a market.
To some extent, it’s reversing the iterative nature of agile, and applying it during pre-development when performing product research. Feedback loops are enormously powerful when dealing with prospects and customers too.
“Market Testing Velocity” can mean a lot to you in a high-pressure situation if you want to get something going quickly. If you complete tests quickly, you can run multiple tests in succession.
In this case, you are doing marketing research on your prospects or existing customers, in order to map out what they need. Your goal is to identify what they need most, a “bleeding neck”, as quickly as possible. You are trying to discover a cognitive and emotional map of their needs, in order to orient your own efforts most effectively.
If this tickled your fancy, and you’d like to read more about market testing velocity, you’ll find out more in Launch Tomorrow.
“Your success will be a function of the number of learning cycles you fit into your runway” -Tom Hulme, Ideo Startups face a peculiar type of time management problem. They have a fixed amount of time, yet they need to learn extremely rapidly, in order to achieve the right fit as fast as they can….
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