Test before you build: How agile innovation teams validate product ideas without slowing down

Most new products fail not because they’re bad, but because they were never tested. According to Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, 90% of the 30,000 new products launched each year fail. 

Traditional research cycles involve rigid drawn-out research phases that don't fit today’s innovation timelines. These traditional research cycles can delay product launches, cause product teams to miss out on acting on shifts in market or consumer trends at the right time and use up valuable company resources. Teams want to move quickly. And agile teams are validating ideas early and often with quick-hit validation supported by consumer insights. 

In this post, I cover how agile teams validate their early product ideas quickly with real consumers — allowing them to move forward with confidence. 

TL;DR: Most new products fail because teams fail to test them beforehand. But traditional research approaches can be slow, rigid and expensive. An agile approach can help teams move with speed — validating product concepts with target consumers and helping them move forward with confidence.

How do we know if our product ideas will resonate before we invest in them?

Many companies greenlight ideas based on internal belief or leadership pressure, deciding what consumers need based on personal insight, past experience or intuition. That leads to wasted budgets, delays and loss of trust with customers. 

While things like brand values, philosophy and leadership experience often have a small role to play in helping to develop a great product, the most successful product launches are built on in-depth consumer insights that help you understand what your target customer base genuinely wants or needs from a product. 

Teams need to develop product ideas based on customer demand and market viability, rather than intelligent guesswork or internal pressures. Consumer insights are the best replacement for intelligent guesswork and provide you with concrete guidance and insight into whether or not there is a good product-market fit. Data-driven validation is essential for improving your chances of a successful product launch. Testing your product ideas with customers early on helps you assess consumer desire and needs accurately, supports customer adoption and encourages customer retention. 

Poor research can also lead companies to mistakenly believe that a product could be a strong fit for their target customer. For example, predominantly relying on more basic consumer characteristics like demographic features typically won’t be enough for your product to resonate with consumers. 

Clay Christensen, professor at Harvard Business School, says: "The fact that you're 18 to 35 years old with a college degree does not cause you to buy a product. It may be correlated with the decision, but it doesn't cause it. We developed this idea because we wanted to understand what causes us to buy a product, not what's correlated with it. We realized that the causal mechanism behind a purchase is, 'Oh, I've got a job to be done.' And it turns out that it's really effective in allowing a company to build products that people want to buy."

You need to go beyond basic demographic and behavioral data and get real-time feedback on consumers’ needs, wants and preferences — using research approaches like surveys and interviews to uncover whether or not they believe your product could be desirable or beneficial to them and how. 

💡 In essence, your product should be trying to solve a “job to be done” (JTBD) whether that’s helping a consumer wash their laundry quicker or helping them impress party guests with the right snacks. You can use an AI-based consumer insights tool like Zappi to test early-stage product concepts with real consumers and help identify high-potential ideas that help consumers fulfill their JTBD.

We need fast feedback on concepts, not a full-blown study

Deeper consumer insights guided by qualitative data are essential to creating a desirable product, but speed and agility are equally important. 

R&D and product teams need just enough signal to inform direction, rather than get weighed down by weeks or months of data collection. Teams need fast access to a verifiable quick hit of insight that they can use as a foundation for promising product development. Validating ideas early and often allows teams to validate product concepts and make necessary changes before investing time in extensive research and product development — reducing risk, accelerating time to market and helping to ensure customer satisfaction.

As we touched upon earlier, traditional research cycles are often too slow, requiring extensive data collection and analysis. Teams also need to account for the time it takes to integrate this data into the product development process with interactive development, requiring multiple drawn-out research, design, development and testing rounds for each ideation. This rigid approach demands teams follow a linear, sequential "waterfall" model, where each phase must be completed before moving onto the next — often creating bottlenecks, making it difficult to act on sudden market changes or shifting consumer needs and prolonging time to market. Such an approach also typically becomes expensive — with both the cost of delay and demand for extensive resources costing businesses.

Agile product validation allows you to validate ideas with speed with short, iterative cycles guided by consumer insights early. An agile approach allows you to quickly assess and verify that your product and surrounding designs and messaging resonate with consumers and meet a genuine customer need — giving you the immediate hit of insight you need to quickly move forward with product development. 

💡 Zappi’s consumer insights platform is ideal for supporting agile product development. You can even upload sketches and immediately test out your earliest designs, ideas and messaging with target consumers — getting structured consumer feedback in as little as 48–72 hours. 

We want to move fast—but not blindly

Agility is essential for accelerating time to market. But the time pressures typically present in agile sprints and rapid prototyping can push teams to skip validation. The urgency to launch products quickly can push teams to skip over these important validation steps — leading them to fall back on assumptions and questionable gut instincts about what consumers want or need from their products. In essence, they're mistakenly trading speed for true validation. But fast doesn't matter when your destination is wrong. 

💡 You can use Zappi to run directional concept tests between sprints to pivot or move forward based on real signals from consumers. Zappi allows you to test new variations of a concept with your target consumers in between each sprint – from early product ideas and sketches displayed on moodboards to preliminary designs. Zappi gives you the insights you need to know you’re moving in the right direction — which you can now do quickly and effectively. 

We don’t have the time or budget for traditional agencies

Hiring external researchers or agencies is typically expensive, costing upwards of tens of thousands of dollars. For example, a single in-person focus group can cost from $2,000 to $12,000. While senior researchers, the most reputed research teams and those with specialist expertise or domain knowledge can charge far higher rates. 

It can also take weeks to hire the right research team — which can undercut agility, often requiring: 

1. Product teams to define research objectives and methodologies before starting the hiring process. 

2. A lengthy search for prospective researchers, which often demands hours of online research, networking and setting up initial meetings.

3. Screening and shortlisting promising candidates, which often takes time to compare and analyze several applications and resumes. 

4. Several rounds of interviews, including structuring your interviews, scheduling, conducting, transcribing and analyzing interview data (all of which can also be hugely time consuming). 

5. Contract negotiations and onboarding, including finalizing your contracts, negotiating pay and terms and onboarding researchers. 

In short, hiring external researchers is often expensive and time consuming, but internal research teams are typically backlogged or understaffed — meaning they have less time and resources to give to product research. 

💡 You can use Zappi’s self-serve tools for testing early-stage product concepts and related creative assets without extensive procurement, training or research expertise. For example, you can use the Screen It 2.0 tool to test a variety of product ideas in over 50 markets in as little as five hours. The tool provides sequential ranking on measures chosen by you — helping you quickly identify the ideas that work for your audience and optimize them based on real-time consumer insights.

Just because you want to move fast doesn't mean you can’t do your research. Explore how Zappi’s Innovation solutions help brands reduce risk without slowing down.