Last month a few of our Titaners flew over to Taiwan for an in-house Growth Hacking workshop conducted together with our Taiwan office counterparts. The purpose of Growth Hacking was to help our teams to understand how the concept of growth hacking could be applied to improving our product or having quicker iteration.
Today we’d like to share a seemingly simple concept that was taught about Validating of Assumptions. Basically, without delving too much into the concept, the idea is to validate an assumption/idea in the quickest and cheapest way possible. We all know the feeling what it’s like to come up with a solution to a problem, spend months slogging away at it only to realize that we failed to validate our assumption early enough, that this solution we created isn’t what the customer wants and that we’ve just wasted hundreds of man hours only to land back at square one.
There is the belief that every iteration is the opportunity to change things. Did you really look at the problem you were trying to solve or did you just get carried away using some data that proved your theory correct. Do you have the courage to admit that you are wrong at every iteration and reset the whole idea as early as it needs to be to minimize waste?
Some examples would be:
- ‘FAQ’ button- Track number of clicks to see how many people would be interested before writing the FAQ
- ‘Join Now’ button- User submits email and it is actually sent manually on the back-end of the system. If enough people ‘join’ this is proof that it might be worth investing the time to create an automated solution to address the need.
- Creating a new website/ product- create a landing page on your intended URL for interested users to leave their emails. If enough people sign-up then it’s worth it to spend resource on creating the new website or product.
We think you get the idea.
More thoughts on Growth Hacking from our Titaners
It doesn’t matter what role you’re in as this concept can be applied in various areas and our Titaners have shared with us how they have found the concept useful along with some tips:
- This training has changed the way I think about how I help our teams to overcome their obstacles. As a Scrum Master I learnt a few things that I frequently ask myself such as- Did I really do all that I could to help our teams be successful? Did we dig deep enough to discover the exact problem we are trying to solve? Are we employing the cheapest and fastest ways to validate the method to solve our problems? – Maryanto, Scrum Master
- Reducing waste is the most important thing. It is important to validate customers’ needs before you start doing the preparation work. Seeking early feedback will help to reduce waste. Even the testing phase needs to be done properly, just imagine- bad testing could change your entire goal to another product or business market!- Paochi, Data Scientist
- This concept has given me new insights into quick validation of what is useful for our users- Lorraine, Sr. Content Specialist
Do you have any thoughts on how to apply the validating of assumptions concept? Leave your comments below!
T.8ytes by Titansoft 