Testing and Screening

It is the nature of the entrepreneur to be optimistic and indeed optimism is a vital factor in maintaining the drive and energy you will need to succeed. This characteristic needs to be tempered with realism, though, and the failure of the world at large to share the developer's enthusiasm is a constant source of amazement to many of them. How can they not line up for my product in their thousands? I've put my blood, sweat and tears into it and it's brilliant!

The market has no sentiment. If you can - and it's not optional if you are planning to spend serious development dollars - you should try to test the market, but before you even get that far, screen out the losers before you waste valuable time and money on them.

Screening

If, in the idea generation phase of your product development, you have let the creativity flow there's a chance that you have many ideas and it's impractical to develop all of them. Some you will discard immediately as non-runners and you won't need any serious analysis to do that - you can tell many of the dogs intuitively. Others you may not be so sure about and at this point it may be appropriate to use some more formal method of screening out product ideas that will not work. You could set up a checklist of desirable characteristics and rate each product idea against it. Here's an example of how to do it. The items in my checklist are just examples. Think about the elements you would want to build into your own checklist.

PRODUCT IDEA SCREENING CHECKINGLIST 1
Characteristic	Product Idea A	Product Idea B
Simple to produce	Yes	No
Inexpensive to Produce	Yes	No
Requires no warehousing	Yes	No (it does)
Can be delivered online	Yes	No
Inexpensive to promote	Yes	No
High growth/demand	Yes	No
Good niche/not too much competition	Yes	No

A simplified example just for illustration. Obviously you would screen out product idea B and proceed with product idea A. Your checklist will probably be much more thorough than the above and the result won't always be so clear cut. Most of the time all the potential products will have some things going for them and some against. In these cases you might allocate a weighting to each characteristic on the list depending on how important you think it is and allocate points to the competing product ideas. In the following example, ten desirable characteristics of varying importance have been identified and there are three competing product ideas:

So, given what we've identified as being the most important things to us, product idea A is looking best but product idea B is not too far behind so rather than just slavishly follow what is after all just a tool to help analyse things, we should tease out the relative advantages of these two a bit more. However, we can pretty safely rule out product idea C at this stage, so our screening process has advanced somewhat. And so it goes on until you decide what you will bring to market. Now the important thing to note is that the above process does not really prove anything, it just helps you narrow your options down to those that will most likely be successful. Once you do settle on a product to develop, and particularly if it's going to be costly to do so, you may want to test the concept and/or pilot test the product.

Testing

Especially where software is concerned, new browser versions and the like, you'll often get a 'beta' version - an almost complete version before the product proper is launched. That's an example of product testing in action. There's no better way to find out what works well, what fails, where the bugs are, what feature customers like and what features they hate than to test drive the product in the market.

Obviously with complex software this makes sense, but it does not always seem so obvious why a simpler and more straightforward product should be piloted in this way. Nevertheless, the more you think about it, the more you realise that marketers are constantly modifying and redesigning their products in the light of customer feedback. The point is that if you can iron out the principal problems before the big launch, your chances of market success will be much greater.