Hi learners!
Welcome to the 22nd lesson in the series 30 Days of PM by Crework! Today, we will be talking about hypothesis and how you use them to validate your product decisions.
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What is Product Hypothesis?
A product hypothesis is an assumption made within a limited understanding of a specific product-related situation. It further needs validation to determine if the assumption would actually deliver the predicted results or add little to no value to the product.
The crucial factors required to build a clear hypothesis statement are —
Assumption — An assumption made based on observations (Either to fix a problem or to update the product feature).
Condition — The condition is the reason why the assumption was made (Example — lack of user interaction with the product or dip in page traffic).
Prediction (Impact) — Prediction is the success or failure rate of the hypothesis.
Basically, a hypothesis is a prototype where we think that an improvement in the product will give us a bump in terms of user interaction, business revenue, and other metrics.
For example, one hypothesis could be - “Increasing the size of images will give us 10% more clicks on the images after 1 week”
Need for hypothesis-driven feature development
Hypothesis-driven practices provide a space to brainstorm based on user behaviors, build a hypothesis, and convert them into a significant feature.
The process also gives us a thorough understanding of what, how, and why to prioritize the product’s features backed by real data.
If you build something and test it on some users to see if your assumptions are giving the required results or not, you will make a better decision and save a lot of money and time.
Overall, the impact of hypothesis testing has a direct effect on the business goals and revenue streams.
How to do Hypothesis Testing?
Step 1 - Write down the uncertainties or challenges of the product and brainstorm questions
Understanding the problem you are trying to solve is necessary, and so is to understand the unknowns and uncertainties that make the problem hard to solve.
Now, after understanding these problems and uncertainties, you need to come up with multiple hypothesis for features.
Step 2 - Build hypothesis statements
The possible assumptions or solutions to the shortlisted questions are the real hypothesis for our product. A problem can have multiple solutions and those multiple solutions can be solved in more than 1 way, so different designs and implementations.
Now, you need to choose one good hypothesis and test it out.
Step 3 - Test your hypothesis
Testing is vital to product lifecycle management as it decides whether the hypothesis is true or false. It gives us a conclusion on whether to accept the hypothesis and push it to the production stage or reject it and revise or tweak the assumptions.
What do you do if your hypothesis passes? - It’s a no brainer, you implement the solution and release the feature to a wider set of audience
What do you do if the hypothesis fails or doesn’t create any impact?
Here, you ask the questions:
Are there other ways of implementing the same solution that might perform better?
Is this even the right feature to solve this problem?
Are we even solving the right problem for the users?
Day 22 - Completed ✅
Congratulations on completing the 22nd lesson of the series. 🥳
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