Product School

3 Ways to Validate Your Product Idea by Testing a Hypothesis

Gabriela Araujo

Gabriela Araujo

January 09, 2023 - 3 min read

Updated: January 24, 2024 - 3 min read

Having a product idea is great… But how do we know if the problem we are trying to solve actually exists? Learn the ways you can do this! 

A/B testing is the most common approach used to validate your hypothesis.

Online Mortgage Lead Gen Flow Overview

  • Bigger focus on a single transaction (‘lead’) 

  • Sensitive to market conditions (Ex. Increase in interest rates)

  • Impacted by government regulations (Ex. HARP extension)

  • Marketing-driven (Ex. changes in marketing costs)

  • Highly competitive and dynamic

    Lead buyers exert great influence on the quality and price for leads they accept

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3 Tactics to Test Your Product Idea

1. A/B testing

A way to compare two versions of something to see which one performs better.

  • Benefits:

    • Allows for distinction between causation and correlation

    • Streamlined and easy to use tools available (ex. Optimizely)

    • Can yield significant improvements to KPI goals

  • Cons:

    • Does not maximize value across audiences

    • Not easily adaptable to changes in user behavior or market conditions

    • Can be time-consuming to get statistically significant results and business value

  • Use Cases:

Appropriate for testing fundamental changes in the online experience.

  1. Test fundamentally different designs or user experiences (Ex. LMB)

  2. Test difference in a number of steps and grouping of questions for online forms (Ex. LMB)

  3. Longer forms and moving deeper in the funnel (Ex. LT)

2. Personalization

Customizing a service or a product to meet the specific needs of a segment of consumers.

  • Benefits:

    • Maximizes the business value from specific consumers’ groups

    • Presents the best customer experience to specific consumers’ groups

  • Cons:

    • Difficult to discover differences in audiences

    • Costly to implement personalized experiences at scale

3. Predictive Personalization

Use predictive technologies to determine the variations of the product or service which performs best for specific consumer groups.

  • Benefits:

    • Maximizes the business value across all consumer groups

    • Presents the best customer experience across all consumer groups

  • Cons: 

    • Fewer commercial tools are available

    • Costly or complex to implement technology in-house

Personalization Examples

The ideal approach for sustainable ongoing optimizations, capturing incremental value and maximizing value.

  • Examples:

    • Engaging headlines on landing pages

  • Convenient ‘common’ answers

  • Consistent CTA placements

  • Setting expectations and progress indicators

  • Effects of branding and site logos

Summary

  • Use A/B testing to find the best base site experience

  • Use personalization to optimize for different audiences

  • Leverage predictive personalization if available to:

    • Maximize business value and consumer satisfaction

    • Adapt to changes in market and consumer behavior

    • Streamline ongoing optimizations

Have you ever applied any of these approaches? Which one worked for you? Share your comments with us!

Updated: January 24, 2024

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