Your Baby Might Be Ugly… don’t neglect market testing

As a CEO or company manager, it’s an understandable reaction to fall in love with your product or service. For many of those who have devised and then nurtured ideas into fruition, it’s difficult not to have an emotional – almost parental – connection to products, companies and their services. If this is the case, you may neglect market testing, and fail to realise that your baby might, in fact, be ugly.

However, it’s crucial to not let that instinct cloud your judgement. In fact, it is more nurturing to allow these ideas to grow to their full potential through even-handed analysis, designed to will drive improvement. Partial judgement through rose-tinted spectacles will only ever damage your product, rather than improve it.

How To Detect Flaws in Your Products or Business

When devising or launching a brand new product, it’s vital to be careful, at every step of the process, to ensure that you don’t miss any flaws. Once your idea is fully formed, you need to assess whether or not it is commercially viable, and then research the market to understand exactly where it would fit in and whether it addresses consumer needs. You may think that your idea is valuable to you personally, but will it be valuable for anyone else? Be strict at every step of your product development, from inception to testing, and look for flaws wherever they may be.

Emotion Getting In The Way

It’s all well and good looking for flaws, but you must also ensure that you detach emotion from the process, or you may unconsciously miss defects that are staring you right in the face. Simply willing your idea to be as perfect as you first imagined does not mean that it is, and it’s vital that you don’t let wishful thinking get in the way of constructive development.

The Importance of Evidence and Data in Analysing Your Product and Business

Leading on from this point, the only things that should be informing the decisions about your product are strategy, evidence and data. Garnering this data from market testing is one of the most trustworthy ways to ensure that your product will be a success.

How Product Consultants Can Help

Enlisting the services of product consultants will provide you with an independent-minded arbiter who can ensure that the decisions you make, and the products you are planning to take to market, are water-tight. This service can help you come to terms with the idea that, perhaps, your ‘baby’ isn’t quite as perfect as you first thought.

Samepage: Helping You Create Value For Your Clients

Here at Samepage, we like to think of ourselves as a ‘critical friend’ who isn’t scared to be frank and constructive about how your business connects with its customers. We believe in companies being agile while always putting those customers first. We can help you do this by helping design strategies which create value for clients.