đŠâ¨ Stop polishing turd products with this one weird trick
Hard Test, Easy Life.
Iâm pretty bullish on the idea of product teams starting new initiatives with a Hard Test. The other day I found myself thinking about why this is so effective.
A Hard Test is when you ship an ugly, tiny-scale, rough, hand-operated, cobbled-together version of Your Big Idea⢠to at least one real customer.
Itâs uncomfortable for many teams â scary even â and Iâve realised why.
Itâs because you canât dress up your product release in what you think a product ought to look like. So thereâs absolutely nowhere to hide.
Youâre forced to contend directly with the value the release delivers â or doesnât.
You strip the whole thing back to only the element of Your Big Idea⢠that you believe helps your customer be a little bit more awesome. And then itâs staring at you.
Thereâs no perfume to mask the smell. No glitter to distract the eye.
Yes, if Your Big Idea⢠is secretly a turd, the Hard Test forces you to behold it, in all its majesty.
Whereas â if there actually IS value in that beating heart of Your Big Idea⢠â customers will see past the ugly. The thing will actually help them be slightly more awesome, and youâll know about it. (Yes, theyâll also complain that itâs janky, but those kinds of complaints are easy to fix, as well as a good sign that the customers care.)
As Alberto Savoia, author of The Right It, put it (continuing the poo-etic theme of this post) âif people really, REALLY want your product, they will put up with a lot of, ahem, C.R.A.P. (Clunkiness, Rough edges, Attention to details, and Performance issues.)â
Your Hard Test probably wonât look anything like your final product. It probably wonât involve designing UI or writing code â at least not in the way most product teams think about those activities. (Stay out of Figma!) Add no product bells or whistles. Just do barely enough to help one customer be slightly more awesome.
Remember: Iâm NOT saying you should ship the ugly Hard Test at scale! OF COURSE thereâs a lot to gain by building Your Big Idea⢠well, making it look amazing, run smoothly, all those good things. Craft and polish absolutely matter. I just like to make sure my teams arenât applying their craft skills and precious energy on polishing yet another turd product.
Iâve seen this simple, uncomfortable practice save so many teams from wasting so much time on the wrong things.
Example
A few years back, my team needed to design an insights dashboard for our customers. Our Big Idea⢠was to give customers a new view of their data that would help them take more effective action each week.
Weâd already established with early market probes that there was enough demand for what our product idea promised. Now we needed to figure out how to actually deliver on that promise.
Enter the Hard Test: an ugly spreadsheet that we emailed manually to a handful of customers. The spreadsheet showed each customer a novel view of their actual data, crunched through a data science model, and with a couple of graphs thrown in.
It didnât look good (I believe the designer on the team still has nightmares). But it did work.
Customers started getting in touch, asking if we could send next weekâs edition to a few more of their colleagues. We invited customers to calls so we could learn more, and their questions and suggestions guided us.
Because it was only a spreadsheet, it was incredibly cheap and quick for us to add parts, change parts, or throw parts away. Over just 10 weeks, we evolved an ugly-but-valuable dashboard that most of the Hard Test customers had started using to get real results. The engineers on the team added little automations as we understood more about what we were doing, and that made it easier to put every spreadsheet together.
The final version of our spreadsheet dashboard was wildly different from what anyone had imagined when we started out. We had also learned exactly why our initial ideas wouldnât have worked. All in just over 2 months. Thatâs the power of a Hard Test.
After that, the team and the stakeholders were confident to polish the design and code the product properly to release at scale, knowing we werenât polishing a turd product.
Three methods to distil a Hard Test out of Your Big Ideaâ˘
Method 1: Only train the monkey to juggle the fire
Astro Teller of Google X uses a metaphor with his teams to help them zero in on the Hard Test:
âIf you plan to train a troop of monkeys to juggle fire while standing on pedestals in the town square, donât waste any time building pedestals until youâve figured out how to get at least one monkey to juggle fire.â
Pedestals are fun to design and easy to build, which makes them an attractive place to start working. You know what they look like, you can get moving quickly and feel like youâre making progress. But this âprogressâ is a trap! If you canât solve the monkey-juggling-fire part, a million pedestals wonât help. In fact, the more pedestals you build, the more time youâve wasted and the more sunk cost youâve created.
So, which part of Your Big Idea⢠is the part where you train the monkey to juggle fire?
Method 2: Simulate two key moments
(A version of this appears in my card deck, Innovation Tactics. Pre-orders open now.)
Write down in detail what you believe a future customer of Your Big Idea⢠will do, see and feel in 2 key moments:
when they choose it (i.e. they find it, they assess it, they buy it âŚ)
when using it actually makes their life better
Ask yourself and your team, âfor those two vital moments, how can we simulate them today â without building anything?â
Brainstorm 3 different ways you could achieve this. Choose the one that you can get into one customerâs hands the quickest. This is your Hard Test.Write down what youâll need to see customers do during this Hard Test to feel confident that youâre onto something with Your Big Ideaâ˘.
Deliver the Hard Test. Occasionally, everything will go as you anticipated. Not often though! Itâs likely that youâll need to pay attention, learn, make changes and repeat your Hard Test. You might need to make tweaks, change plans radically, or even go right back to the drawing board. (My Signals > Stories > Options framework will help you make sense of what youâre seeing and choose what to do next.)
Method 3: Enrol for my course, Innovate Confidently, this May
Designing a good Hard Test is one of the techniques youâll master if you join a cohort of my Innovate Confidently course.
Youâll get to practise taking a real product idea and zeroing in on the moments that matter by layering the signals you need to see onto a Multiverse Map â a model of how a customer will use your idea. Youâll also get to see lots of examples that inspire different ways to Hard Test your ideas.
Ready to register? Hereâs the link: https://maven.com/tom-kerwin/innovate-confidently-with-pivot-triggers
If youâd like to ask me any questions about it, grab a slot for a no-strings chat: https://calendly.com/tom-kerwin/chat-with-tom
And want to see if your manager will foot the bill, grab the template behind the âget reimbursed by your employerâ link on the course page.
â Tom x
Thanks to
for helping me shape up the Hard Test version of this article, and Alberto Savoia for encouragement and C.R.A.P. :)