How to validate your product ideas

Building a product from the ground up can be quite the journey—full of unexpected challenges and surprising wins. Before you invest significant resources into developing a new product, it’s valuable to have evidence that would-be users are likely to respond well to it. 

That’s where product validation comes in. This practice is a lifesaver for reducing risk and saving valuable time, money, and resources. 

This guide explains what product validation is, how it helps you run better product experiments, and how you can use it to launch new products with confidence and flair.

What is product validation?

Product validation is the process of testing an idea with potential users to get feedback on a product’s viability. It answers the question, should we actually build this?  

The most common things to assess for are

• Desirability: is this something users want? Does it line up with their desires and pain points? 

• Usability: is it intuitive enough for users? Will people be able to understand it? 

• Feasibility: can we actually build it? Do we have the resources we need to make this a success? 

After you’ve validated the concept for your product and determined you’re going to develop and roll it out to users, you can start running product experiments on smaller aspects of it. 

How is product validation different from product experimentation?

Both product validation and product experiments help teams build better products. According to Andrei Beno, one of Contentsquare’s Directors of Product, the core differentiator between the 2 is the stage at which they take place:

Product validation implies assessing whether the product actually provides enough user value and makes sense to build (i.e. is there a viable business model to support it), and it’s often most useful for the earliest stages of a product’s development. 

Validation is most useful for assessing a new feature or product. It often happens at the earliest stages of product development and is essential for determining whether a product is on track to success. 

Unlike product validation methods, experimentation needs to compare a new variation against the control, which already has to be built. Experimentation is most useful to assess iterations and improvements to a feature or product once it’s already in use. 

As a practice, experimentation can also be smaller-scale and lower stakes than product validation. You can run experiments on tweaks as small as updating microcopy, changing a button color, or moving a CTA on a landing page.

How does product validation help with product experimentation?

If you validate a product before developing it, any experiments you conduct down the line will have a greater chance of success. Here’s why. 

1. It gives you confidence you’re going in the right direction 

Let’s say you’ve validated a product idea, built it, then launched it—but the launch goes badly. 

In that case, product validation keeps you aware that the problem is with the execution of the idea rather than the idea itself. You’ll have evidence that if you run experiments iterating on your new, failed product, it will eventually find success.

2. It helps you get to know what your users want

Product validation typically means running interviews, researching competitors, and perhaps analyzing survey results. All of these offer useful context when it comes to planning experiments. Any experimentation hypotheses you come up with down the line will be grounded in a solid understanding of your users’ pain points, motivations and behavior. 

3. It helps build an experimentation culture 

Companies that validate ideas early are set up to implement a consistent product experimentation framework. Validating products sends a strong message that the direction of your product roadmap depends on customer data, rather than the opinions and assumptions of higher-ups.   

4. It boosts team alignment

Without product validation, the development team often tries to build a product to ever-changing specifics, based on intuitions from the founders about what might be able to sell itself. 

Conversely, when teams have validation for a product’s desirability, usability, and feasibility, they feel confident that the company is making decisions based on evidence over hierarchy. This encourages team members to speak up about bold and innovative ideas for experiments. 

A simple 6-step product validation process 

For the perfectionists amongst us, it can be tempting to build your products in secret. However, for the best chance of building something popular, it's far more sensible to validate your ideas and get feedback on your creation along the way. Here’s what that can look like. 

1. Identify your assumptions 

First off, work as a team to choose a product idea that your stakeholders broadly agree is aligned with your company’s goals. Then, formulate that idea in a couple of sentences, including what problem it would solve, who would use it, and what metrics you’d measure product success by. 

For example:

We have an idea to build an app for finding plantsitters to water your plants when you’re on vacation. We think childless millennials who live in cities and go on vacation more than twice a year would use it. We’d measure success by app store downloads and revenue.

Once you’ve turned your idea into an elevator pitch, list out the assumptions that underpin it. For example, in our case: 

• We’re assuming that there are lots of millennials with houseplants and disposable income to go on holiday twice a year

• We’re assuming that this demographic would pay for a plant-sitting service 

• We’re assuming this demographic would be comfortable with a stranger watering their plants when they’re out of town

This may be disheartening, but playing devil’s advocate with yourself now will identify any areas that may undermine your validation efforts later. Work through your list of assumptions and assess 

• How much does the success of my product depend on this assumption? 

• How much evidence do you already have for that specific assumption?

• What type of data is best to validate the assumption? (Think: user interviews, survey responses, demographic data) 

The answers will help you prioritize your assumptions, and think about how you can validate them. 

2. Narrow down and validate your target market

Knowing your target audience is the first step to validating whether your product is viable. This allows you to determine if there’s an actual market with consumers who would pay for your product.

To validate your target market:

• Set up interviews: start with a narrow audience and prioritize your roadmap by asking customers about their needs

• Conduct surveys: use surveys to validate the problem space and gain confidence in your hypothesis before building 

Pro tip: Contentsquare—an all-in-one experience intelligence tool—helps you streamline the processes of interviewing users and surveying them. 

• The Interviews tool dramatically reduces the admin of conducting 1:1 interviews. You can recruit participants from your own network or find them from our diverse pool of 200,000+ users. It allows you to host, transcribe, record, and analyze insights from these invaluable conversations, all in one place.

• The Surveys tool allows you to create, host and analyze user surveys easily. Set up a product validation survey in seconds with our templates, or use Contentsquare’s AI-question generator to create unbiased, effective questions that help you validate your particular idea. There’s also a suite of AI tools to help you analyze open-text answers efficiently. 

Contentsquare offers a library of free survey templates, including this concept testing one 

3. Research the market

At this stage, you’re looking to validate your production needs and analyze your competition. Who else is offering what you’re planning to make, and how are they doing it? 

Examine things like

• The price value or range of similar products

• Market saturation for this niche 

• The brand appearance of similar companies 

• Companies’ marketing strategies 

• The unique selling point (USP) or differentiator of each competitor 

Collecting this information helps you consider where your product might fit among the competition and how your offer will stand out. 

In tandem with this research, sketch out a story for what you plan to build, so you can sell the idea to different stakeholders across your business. 

4. Discuss logistics   

Now that you've investigated your target audience and done market research, it’s time to consider how feasible this idea is from your company’s perspective. Sit down with key stakeholders (such as project, finance, engineering, and UX leads) and talk through the logistical aspects of your idea. Working off of data from past products, team experience, and your market research, discuss: 

• The potential ROI for this product

• How much time and resource it will take to build 

• The effort to impact ratio 

• How this will affect your existing plans and product roadmap 

5. Create and test an early prototype  

If you’re getting positive feedback from your interviews and surveys, plus your research throws up a gap in the market, it’s time to build an early prototype and see how users respond to it. Do this with a Fake Door test. 

A Fake Door test, otherwise known as a honeypot, is a tool for validating and estimating demand for a non-existent product. It involves launching a sign-up page for the product or a button to access a feature that you haven’t built yet. 

For example, you could create a landing page for your plant-sitting app, which has a CTA to sign up—but when users click on it, they’re invited to a waitlist rather than a download page. 

Measure the success of your Fake Door test page by analyzing data like the number of sign-ups and traffic it generates, and by collecting session replays. These video-style recordings show how users interact with your page. Watch them for insights into which parts of your product’s landing page users pay the most attention to.  

Do you have a more advanced prototype? Run user tests easily with Contentsquare 

Perhaps it wouldn’t make sense to run a Fake Door test for the idea you’re validating, or perhaps your prototype is more developed than a simple sign-up page. In these cases, validate it with user tests instead. 

Contentsquare’s User Tests tool simplifies the process of conducting unmoderated tests on your products. This tool sends participants a set of instructions for a task to complete on your site and records how they complete it. 

You’ll be able to see where they click, hover and scroll—and quickly understand if your prototype’s usability is as intuitive as you’d planned it to be! 

6. Make an assessment 

Finally, it’s time to draw all the information together and make the call. Remember: you’ll need to tick all 3 of these boxes to consider your product idea validated.

• Desirability: do your interviews and surveys suggest this is something users want? 

• Usability: do your honeypots or user tests provide evidence that users will understand this product? 

• Feasibility: do your team leads believe you have the time and resources to create this product? Does your market research show that it’s likely to be a good business decision? 

Product validation and experimentation go hand in hand

Product validation and product experimentation share the same goal: to place users’ thoughts, feelings and experiences at the heart of the product roadmap, so that outcomes improve for users and business owners alike.  

If you aspire to a culture of product experimentation at your workplace, it’s well worth investing in product validation, too. Once you’ve used validation to ensure the key idea for your product is a hit with your users, any experiments you run after that will be based on a solid foundation. 

FAQs about product validation