Validating Assumptions

So you don’t make an ass out of me

You know the old adage — you should never assume; because assuming only makes an ass out of you and me. But in product management, assumptions are essential to getting to the good stuff — insights and vision.

This is part two of a series of articles that showcases my product management journey with Express Evaluations. If you missed it, read part one of my series and learn how to narrow your product focus.

If you remember from my first article, Express Evaluations and I had created a draft of the product vision. We then crafted a North Star and associated input metrics to hold ourselves accountable for results.

The vision looked like this:

Keep in mind that this vision was created off of a lot of assumptions:

1. Buyers of the product were looking for a cost effective solution
2. Users wanted to customize their performance evaluations templates
3. And finally, HR professionals wanted a faster way of completing the evaluation cycle

The Problem

How could we know that our assumptions would translate to real user motivations and behaviors? We needed some data to back up our hypothesis. I say hypothesis, because product management is a bit of science and art. Express Evaluations was very young in its product maturity — -JUST A BABY! But we had options for digging deeper into our assumptions.

The startup had never worked with a product manager before, so they had some trepidation with the process. I personally believe building trust and leading with transparency is one of the most important roles that a product manager can take on. So I took baby steps with this team. (Remember they are a baby? ;)

We started with two customer interviews. One customer was a prospective client and had a much bigger overall potential user base. The other customer was smaller and had already signed a contract.

The Approach to Validation

Authors of About Face write, “When designers focus on people’s goals — the reasons why they use a product in the first place — as well as their expectations, attitudes, and aptitudes, they can devise solutions that people find both powerful and pleasurable to use.”

This is what I’m passionate about when I manage a product. I want to understand what customers’ goals are day to day. What can we do in software and any product, for that matter, to make someone feel powerful?

So I approached my customer interviews with that pursuit in mind. I wanted to really understand the underlying goals, motivations, and behaviors of these customers. What I discovered in the process was that one of our assumptions in our product vision was totally off!

The owners of Express Evaluations were focusing on offering customization capabilities. The synthesis of the two customer interviews are showcased in the illustration below.

If you notice, customization was a job to be done for LeighAnn, which I pointed out to the Express team. Although she had already purchased the software, Express Evaluations determined that targeting her demographic wouldn’t yield the type of growth they were looking for.

Joe (a beta customer) stated something that highlighted our miss regarding customization. I asked him how regularly he anticipated using the product if he did decide to purchase. He said, “Hopefully as little as possible.” Joe didn’t want to have to create a variety of customized evaluation templates. In fact, he was much more concerned about ease of set up and ease of continued use.

In other words….

The Outcome

This led to a much more defined vision the focused on not customization, but on ease. So instead of this —

We now have this —

Making mistakes in product management is all part of the experience. But if you want to proactively prevent disaster in development, validate your assumptions through qualitative and quantitative data. Whether that is through surveys, customer interviews, product data, or focus groups. Start somewhere. Trust me, it will make all the difference!