Validate on Real Users

From Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love (2nd ed., Wiley, 2017), Chapter 33, “Principles of Product Discovery.” The line elaborates principle #6, “We must validate our ideas on real users and customers.” It sits next to principle #5, that most ideas won’t work out and the ones that do will require several iterations, which Cagan opens with a Marc Andreessen quote: “The most important thing is to know what you can’t know.” If you accept #5, #6 is the operational answer: put the actual idea in front of actual users before you commit to building.

Cagan names two ways teams convince themselves the validation step is optional. One is upstream customer research, interviews and surveys about the problem. The other is the team’s own product instincts from past wins. Both are real inputs, and both ride on assumptions about how a customer will react to the specific built thing, which is the only reaction that actually predicts whether the product works. Most of the rest of the book is the toolkit for triggering that reaction cheaply, with prototypes and user tests that run before the engineering and rollout costs lock in.