Don’t Just Tell Me, Show Me
This startup technique will serve you well at any stage
During a speech in 1899, U.S. Congressman Willard Vandiver of Missouri demanded “show me” of his colleagues in government. His now famously pragmatic demand earned Missouri its nickname The Show Me State.
“Frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I’m from Missouri. You’ve got to show me.” — Willard D. Vandiver
I use the show-me principle as a digital product management technique. Showing requires backing up a claim, and it has helped me accurately forecast customer acquisition costs, optimize app features for customer activation, inform product pricing strategies, and demonstrate our product performance over our competitors’.
Showing, not just telling, is a must-have technique for startups. Startups are in the business of showing. Showing is their reason for being—to demonstrate that a solution is valuable, and that it’s valuable to many who are reachable.
Master this technique, continue to use it beyond the startup stage, and you’ll be prepared to take your product where it needs to go at every stage.
Case Study: Show Me Growth Stage
In 2017, I was responsible for the mobile and web app products for a well-known fintech. We had worked hard to build a mobile banking platform. We were acquiring U.S. retail customers and even licensing our software to banks as a white label solution. I knew, however, that the product that got us through startup-stage was not necessarily the product that would get us through growth-stage and onto maturity-stage.
With an organizational imperative to invest in growth, I needed evidence that we had placed the right bets on our upcoming roadmap for product expansion. We were, after all, aiming to expand our revenue streams and address the needs of new markets.
I successfully used a combination of hypotheses, collaborative in-market tests, and reality-based forecasts to apply the show-me principle to gain support for our growth stage journey. Here’s how I did it.
1. Start with an Informed Hypothesis
The word hypothesis is sometimes used loosely in digital product management. It’s easy to confuse the idea of hypothesis testing with what is actually nothing more than going with assumptions you are actually already committed to.
Are you testing a hypothesis, or just committing to an assumption?
The key distinction between the two is that you believe an assumption is correct; with a hypothesis you don’t start from that position of commitment. To have a hypothesis, you need prior evidence, but you are not already convinced that evidence means something else is necessarily true — you are only committed to testing whether it is or not.
In the case of our product roadmap, I hypothesized we could use attributes from our organically-acquired customer base to intentionally and repeatably attract and acquire a look-alike audience. I needed to test that the look-alike audience was not random in terms of what attracted them to our solution and what would kept them engaged over time. We would need to show a significant difference in the consumer response to product positioning that we could attribute to a match between their unmet needs and our product solution’s value.
2. Test Your Hypothesis In-market and Cross-functionally
Your customers don’t think about their relationship with your product solution one customer-lifecycle phase at a time. That’s a good indication in-market hypothesis testing is an opportunity to collaborate across your organization’s functions, and to test across the customer lifecycle.
What important problems does your product solve? For whom?
For our in-market test, I considered the options and chose to test a combination of product positioning and features. This approach most closely matched the heart of what investors and other stakeholders wanted to know: How will you grow your base of happy customers that are valuable to our business?
I needed to show that consumers valued our mobile banking solution. And I needed to show there was a growth opportunity among those consumers, in the form of an addressable market of a known size we could efficiently reach. (Yes, efficiently means the economics had to make sense.)
Our in-market tests started with awareness and acquisition. We partnered with a digital agency that had a stellar in-market testing track record. We used new, experimental creative for the express purpose of testing our hypothesis on a limited basis under real market conditions. Positioning and messaging reflected where we believed the product opportunity was for the growth stage imperative. Specifically, we launched a series of small, digital test campaigns targeted at consumers whose characteristics and intent had a high propensity to value where I wanted to take our product.
Most importantly, our in-market testing informed our digital product management efforts and allowed us to show results to our stakeholders, not just tell them. In-market tests also saved us time and money, and mitigated the risks required for a fully committed implementation. In this case, the cost of our in-market testing was less than 1% of the expected cost of the full implementation.
After the tests were running, we had a stream of real results from interactions with real consumers. The targeted campaigns performed 20 times better than the control group campaigns. We had evidence that the target consumers were non-random and responded with intent to sign up for our unique value proposition.
3. Show Implications Based on In-market Results
The in-market test results were compelling in their own right. Even better was their use for showing with high confidence that we understood the implications for our growth imperative. Again, don’t just tell me, show me.
I determined there were three key implications. Our next and final step was to apply these at a larger scale as follows:
- Customer acquisition cost pro forma
This calculation focused on the top of the funnel through to new customer activation. - Product roadmap objectives and key results
This feedback loop informed in-app signup and new customer fulfillment features. - Product pricing
The user research byproduct helped inform a value-based pricing approach for services, rather than a flat, disconnected fee approach.
Reaching this level of forecasting raises the confidence level on other digital product management practices, too. For example, product managers are able to set objectives and target key results as a road mapping method with greater precision and a higher level of confidence. Team members who may otherwise be disengaged from or skeptical about the future of the product or business suddenly see the possibilities in the form of results and reality-based projections.
In Conclusion
A hypothesis supported by in-market tests and reality-based forecasts is a powerful way to back up your claims. Backing up your claims with the show-me principle is a valuable digital product management technique. It’s what ultimately won over our stakeholders.
I recommend the show-me principle as a digital product management technique. It can help you accurately forecast costs, optimize new features, inform product strategies, and better understand how you compare to your competitors. Please keep me posted on your experiences with the show-me principle!
