How to Reduce Your Risk of Failure by Validating Your Assumptions
Which assumption should you validate first? And how to do it.
A few weeks back, I was working with a client on validating a new product idea.They came up with a number of assumptions they had about their market, customer segment, and solution, and they were eager to start validating. But, where to start? Two questions came up:
- How do we choose which assumption to validate?
- How do we choose the right experiment to validate that assumption with?
There isn’t a clear-cut answer to give. The answer in both cases depends on where you are in your journey, as well as other circumstances. But there is a general approach that you can use to think about this question.
In this blog post, I’ll go over that first question, and talk about some of the thought process involved in choosing an assumption to validate. I will also discuss some of the tools you might use to simplify your decision and attempt to formalise selecting the riskiest assumption a bit.
In a future post I will attempt to tackle the second question and deal with experiment selection.
Why validate?
