Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value

Rather than starting with a large-scale experiment (e.g., surveying hundreds of customers, launching a production-quality A/B test, worrying about representative samples), we want to start small. You’ll be pleasantly surprised by how much you can learn from getting feedback from a handful of customers.

As we test assumptions, we want to start small and iterate our way to bigger, more reliable, more sound tests, only after each previous round provides an indicator that continuing to invest is worth our effort. We stop testing when we’ve removed enough risk and/or the effort to run the next test is so great that it makes more sense to simply build

Early Signals vs. Large-Scale Experiments

How many people would convince you this assumption is more known? That’s the negotiation you are having as a team.

Understanding False Positives and False Negatives

With assumption testing, our goal is to collect data that will help us move the assumption from the right to the left on our assumption map (see Chapter 9)—we are starting with an assumption that has weak supporting evidence, and our goal is to collect more evidence. Just like with interviewing (see Chapter 5), to collect reliable data, we want to

To construct a good assumption test, you’ll want to think carefully about the right moment to simulate. You don’t want to simulate any more than you need to. This is what allows you to iterate quickly through several assumption tests.

The key outcome with this exercise is to agree as a team on the smallest assumption test you can design that still gets you results that the team will feel comfortable acting on.

Perhaps, as a next step, we decide to add a section to our real “home screen” promoting an upcoming sporting event. When users select it, it informs them that we are considering adding sports to our lineup, and we ask for feedback by way of a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. We also give them the option to submit comments. We think we can get this exper