Figuring Out vs Finding Out

The path to customer delight is emergent.

When I work with Product Managers, I find that much time is spent figuring out what people want. We forget that Google AdWords, A/B testing and other methods make it much easier to launch and learn than to build out products or features that may or may not be important to customers. If your goal is to determine whether something is important to customers, define your success criteria, present the feature, and see if customers sign up. If you are comparing approaches, run parallel tests with a control group. Whatever the result, you’ll learn much faster using experimentation.

Two books worth checking out:
The Lean Start-up” by Eric Ries and “Little Bets” by Peter Sims