(2011-11-21) Torres What Product Assumptions Are You Making

Teresa Torres: What Product Assumptions Are You Making? ...more often than not, I see that development teams are not even aware that these hypotheses exist, instead building their products as if they were fact. The problem with this approach is that rarely does a team get all, if any, of these hypotheses right from the get-go. If they don’t first test them

Explicitly Enumerating Product Assumptions as Hypotheses (hypothesis)

I have an idea for a Caltrain mobile app

As a daily commuter, I witness a number of problems experienced by occasional riders

I suspect that if Caltrain tackled some of these problems, they might convert more of these occasional riders into daily commuters, growing their ridership.

Should I just get started and build the app? How do I know that occasional riders will want it?

H1: Occasional train riders will download a Caltrain mobile app before they ride the train.

H3: The desire to ride the train is great enough that if occasional train riders had help they would ride the train more frequently

Before I decide whether or not it’s worth it to build this app, I want to test each of these three hypotheses. But how do I do that?

Using the Google keyword tool, I can easily find out how many people search for keywords

would download a mobile app to solve their problems

I can build a simple splash page

H2 might be a little bit harder to test

I can ask friends who are occasional train riders to call me when they run into any of these problems. Do they remember to call me?

Better yet, for the folks who clicked on my “Download” button when testing H1, I can ask them to bookmark a page that acts like an app, so it’s available on their phone. The page could be as simple as an FAQ,

H3 is even tougher yet

I already know what’s going through your head. If I’m solving the problem with an FAQ or by answering one-off questions, why would I build the app at all? That’s exactly the point, I wouldn’t necessarily have to.

It’s An Iterative Process

Each step along the way, as I build out the app, I’m going to keep layering more hypotheses onto the ones I’ve already tested