PMP Q #41- Validating Assumptions
Q41. Your project will help the organisation launch a new product for a new market. Since it’s a new product, many requirements are based on assumptions.
What will be the best way to validate assumptions?
A. Conduct a user interview.
B. Do frequent demos to the stakeholder
C. Deliver a minimum viable product.
D. Give a presentation of assumptions to the stakeholders.
All four options are good. You need to find out the best way to validate assumptions in the Agile approaches when introducing a new product in a new market space.
Option A: “Conduct a user interview” – It’s a good idea. Whenever you want to do something, you discuss it with the stakeholders and understand their needs and expectations. If you talk to users, they can also give you a better perspective of their needs. So it’s good to find the requirements and validate some of your assumptions.
Option B: “Do frequent demos to the stakeholder” – It is also a good option because it helps you showcase completed work and get feedback for –
- Features working as per expectations
- Improvements you need to consider
- Additional things you can add in future iterations or releases, etc
The above feedback helps in validating many assumptions.
Option C – “Deliver a minimum viable product.” – Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is the smallest collection of features you can include in a product for customers to consider it functional. MVP may not benefit the business, but it is an excellent opportunity to learn customer and user behaviour and collect more insightful inputs. So, if you release something functional quickly, you may know many things users may not explicitly tell you. Hence, you can validate assumptions (or hypotheses) using MVP in the shortest possible time. In other words, Minimum Viable Products help to test assumptions and hypotheses related to the product value propositions.
Option D – “Give a presentation of assumptions to the stakeholders.” – It is also a good idea, but it is not as good as delivering MVP. You release MVP to either real users or representatives of the customer segment, which can be a fundamental tool to test your assumptions or hypothesis. Giving a presentation is a discussion, and you can validate assumptions in only abstract form. But, the actual use of the MVP provides a real sense of how your hypothesis works for the users.
After exploring all options, you can see that option ‘D’ is not suitable; now, we need to choose between options A, B, and C.
Option A talks about user interviews; in this case, users can share information only based on your questions. It is not an opportunity to get feedback from the real use of the product. So, if you compare option C with A, option C is a clear winner. So now lets’ compares option B and Option C to see which one is best –
Option B talks about giving frequent demos, But this option is just demonstrating to the stakeholders. It needs to be clarified if, in these stakeholders, you have end users. Stakeholders may be internal and external – here, if you have the new product market and customer segment representative, it is a decent place to collect feedback. You can get real feedback if the stakeholders have end users.
But option C involves end users in the question, so the best answer is option C- “Deliver a minimum viable product.”
