by Janus Boye
“Experiments don’t fail, hypotheses are proven wrong”
With this Airbnb quote, Paul Rissen who is Product Manager at Springer Nature in London, introduced our community to Experiment-Driven Product Development—or XDPD—a new approach that turns the spotlight on questions to be answered, rather than on solutions.
Improving your craft is a key skill for product and user experience professionals working in the digital era. There are many established methods of product development to inspire and focus teams—Sprint, Lean, Agile, Kanban—all of which focus on solutions to customer and business problems.
Within XDPD, discovery is a mindset, not a project phase.
The basic process of experiment-driven product development as outlined by Paul Rissen
In his new book Experiment-Driven Product Development, Paul introduces a philosophy of product development that will hone your skills in discovery, research and learning. By guiding you through a practical, immediately applicable framework, you can learn to ask, and answer, questions which will supercharge your product development, making teams smarter and better at developing products and services that deliver for users and businesses alike.
In a recent member conference call, he was able to condense 9 chapters and 125 pages into a very educational 28-minute summary.
Here’s some of the notable takeaways from the call
Concentrate more on questions rather than leaping to validating solutions. XDPD is a structured way to ask questions
Common misconceptions about experiments
It’s not an A/B test. That’s the method. It’s about the question
Not just for R&D innovation teams
Why use this approach?
Easy to get attached to solutions. Stop obsessing over pet solutions
Listening at scale - helps you form a reliable answer
Data as a stakeholder (not personal data, typically user activity data)
Nobody can agree on what MVP really is. Paul speaks about Simplest Useful Thing
Don’t validate ideas. Can lead you astray as you are trying to prove you are right. Test hypotheses.
You can browse the slides on XDPD (PDF) or view the full recording below.
Want to learn more and connect with other product managers? Then join one of our product management peer groups!