Research sprints
A highly impactful and fast way to
assess product-market fit.
We conduct research sprints for innovative companies to quickly address questions such as:
Do people understand my product?
Will customers find it useful?
Is my product usable?
Research sprints provide quick answers for critical product-market fit questions. They offer the most efficient means to validate assumptions without the need for costly or time-consuming launches. They minimize risk, empowering your team to more confidently meet commitments and help ensure success.
The best part: You can conduct this user research in only a matter of days.
A research sprint is a fast process to quickly gather insights about a product from prospective users.
The problem
Most startups know they don’t have all the answers, so they rush to launch things and see how they perform in the real world. This is a high-fidelity way to answer questions, but it’s hard and slow. It causes technical and design debt, which takes time to resolve, and can frustrate the team, and set poor product expectations for users.
The solution
Once the idea is formed, and a prototype is made, getting feedback from testers enables the team to understand prospects' pain points, validate user requirements, and gauge how well features are received. The team can then implement necessary changes before investing in costly development cycles for undesired capabilities.
The test happens in a matter of days and is truly enlightening. Moreover, this exercise fosters the acquisition of new skills and can enhance team camaraderie, as members collectively examine their product from a whole new, customer informed, perspective.
Research sprints can occur at any point in the product lifecycle to gather insights, validate assumptions, or explore new directions before committing to code.
PROCESS
The Five Step Process
Develop questions and assumptions
The ultimate goal is about obtaining relevant feedback to improve your product. Before the sprint, we work with you to create a set of questions you want to address and the assumptions you need to validate.
Recruit people to test
It's critical to identify representative individuals for testing who closely match your target customers. Whether you have a predefined list or utilize a tool to identify suitable candidates, we need to schedule them for testing sessions.
Develop a prototype
Observing reactions to a lifelike prototype yields rich learning experiences. The higher the fidelity of the prototype, the more authentic the feedback, allowing you to capture genuine reactions to your product rather than abstract thoughts. Note: We can even help you develop that prototype.
Conduct five interviews
We conduct one-on-one interviews, which allow for the observation of facial expressions, gut reactions, and body language, while also facilitating follow-up questions and exploration of interesting tangents. Conducting five interviews is helpful for identifying patterns and enables all research to occur in a single day.
Discuss learnings with the group
We facilitate a discussion based on the notes the entire team takes during the interviews. We help synthesize the findings, and collectively determine the next steps.