De-risking over validation
Words affect your behaviour
Product validation makes you look for proof of your underlying assumptions. It's confirmation bias.
Re-frame it to de-risk, makes alot more business sense.
When you're de-risking, you're saving time and money and then drawing conclusions from that. Take note of 'drawing conclusions'. It's not the same as being 100% sure.
According to Marty Cagan, there are 4 big risks you need to de-risk. Sometimes you may only want to focus on a 1 depending on whether the problem is known or not.
- Value risk: Users will buy it or choose to use it (action)
- Usability risk: Users can use it effectively and efficiently
- Feasibility risk: Whether the team can build it with the time, money and budgets we have
- Business viability: Does the solution work for the rest of the business?
How to de-risk
If your assumption is easy to build and launch and reverse, test on your website.
If the problem is unknown, the Lean UX model is a good framework to use.
The thing about validation is, that it's kind of fake. You can't really be 100% confident your idea is going to work until you launch it.
So even your de-risking has risks. You can't ever really know for sure if you've established a viable solution until it's launched.
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