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How to make the right product decision?

Test them all and pick the best


Making product decisions is hard. You always have a scarcity of resources and sufficiency of ideas. Most importantly you don't want to screw up - fixing something that isn't broken.

What do you do then? How do you make correct decision?
Why wouldn't you ask your most important? Who? - Your customers. Eventually all you do is to satisfy their needs, to solve their problems.

There are variety of ways to test your product idea. Let's overview some of them.


Qualitative research

Is a way for you to get a feedback from an individual, from concrete person.
When you use it? When you don't have good idea about what to do next with your product. You use it for formulate a hypothesis.

When you have a hypotheses, or even a couple of them, you'd want to know which one is the best.
To do that you'll need a


Quantitative research

Is a way for you to validate qualitative hypotheses with many people. Using this kind of research you can validate how many people share same opinion to the one that gave you qualitative feedback.

Kinds of qualitative research

Observation

Is simply you watching other people interacting with products.


Interview

Is simply you talking to other people. 


Focus group

Is simply you talking to a representative group of people.


Kinds of quantitative research

A\B tests

Is simply you trying two variants of the same thing to see what works best.


Multivariate tests

Is simply you trying more than two variants of the same thing to see what works best. 


Survey

Is simply you asking people a couple of questions


Data analysis

Is simply you looking into your stats and trying to figure out what they mean. 


Mixed type of research

Experiments


Is simply you building a prototype to learn from the market. 

In later posts all those techniques will be described in details. 

Within this post I want to have a reference guide on the different ways of making product decisions. This post will be updated regularly with new insight. 

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