How startups can validate product & feature ideas

The unsung truth is that building a product is not the hardest part. Getting everyone on the same page is.

Most startups build an MVP just to figure out if they’ve made something people would actually use. Pivot after pivot, changes and new ideas would pull your team in different directions. 

After discussing ideas for months, they would spend even longer building them. Slowly, the project that seemed straightforward becomes more complex and heavy. So much time wasted to find out something might not work.

It’s why the old school mentality of ‘build first, ask questions later’ is a dysfunctional way of running a product team. Yet, so many teams repeat the same hick-ups time and time again. 

However, a few years ago, we found a process to validate products and test assumptions before we even wrote a single line of code. 

We went from putting all of our bets on one big build to testing many ideas in a matter of days. It completely changed the way we build products.

That process is called a Design Sprint.

Design Sprints are a 5-step process for uncovering insights and rapidly testing new ideas. They allow you to compress months of work into a few days.

It’s the perfect recipe for creating new products or improving existing ones.

Over the past 5 years, we’ve successfully applied this process to help our clients validate their product ideas, remove pivots and reduce re-engineering! 

By stopping endless discussion and replacing it with our process that yielded a working prototype tested with real customers at the end, we were able to cut our clients’ development time in half for SaaS startups Fitpack & Talk it Out.

Design Sprints can also help you uncover opportunities you wouldn’t have even considered before by offering you an insight into how your customers think, act, and buy. By replacing assumptions with real data, you’ll be able to double-down on features your customers will actually pay for.

That’s how Design Sprints can help you test out your product ideas first, instead of going all in based on a hunch, wasting months of development as a result. This tried and tested approach will give you all the answers you need to ship better products, faster - every single time!

If you are in the product business or maybe you’re looking to build something new and you have millions of questions that keep you up at night - you should try running a Design Sprint.