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How Early Concept Validation Can Make or Break Your Product by Rob Trahan
Robert Trahan
Partner, Mass Productive
Imagine you’re tasked with creating a granite countertop. You could eyeball the cabinet space, cut the granite, and hope for the best—but when you bring the finished countertop in from the shop, even being a hair off could mean hard decisions about how to fix the error. Professionals avoid this risk by creating a template first, ensuring the final product fits perfectly and avoids costly mistakes.
Your product concept will also need product-market fit. Let's discuss how early product validation can act as a “template” for your concept, allowing you to react, interact, and iterate before losing your resources to the cutting room floor.
To create something valuable, you need to first understand your audience, not by telling them about your product but by seeing how they naturally solve problems without it. One way to do this is by talking to the people who feel the pain of the problem you’re solving. When conducting interviews, resist the urge to explain your idea—instead, ask about their experiences and observe their problem-solving processes. Surveys, too, can be helpful, but they work best when framed around real-life scenarios rather than hypothetical uses of your product.
You may find that your target audience is already using similar products to accomplish their goals. Identifying your competition can help you to evaluate whether your product has a meaningful place in that landscape. The goal is to see the world through your users’ eyes and observe their pain points in real-time. These insights ensure that your product is aligned with real needs, not just what users say they want.
The validation process generally involves a few key steps: competitive analysis, market research, initial prototypes, and sometimes persona development. Persona development involves speculating about the types of people who might benefit from your product and though it’s helpful as an exercise in empathy, it’s always better to observe real behavior. Watching how people naturally work around problems offers more authentic insights than a crafted persona ever could.
Consider the example of Tidy Cats. When the cat litter company observed customers buying cat litter, they noticed that many people found it challenging to carry heavy litter boxes. Rather than simply asking customers what they wanted, they observed a common workaround: people would keep their litter in the trunk of their car until it was light enough to carry inside. This observation led to the creation of a lighter, more convenient litter, which became a game-changer in their sales. This example highlights the power of observing real behaviors to validate concepts rather than relying on assumptions.
Relying on data and real user behaviors helps prevent the pitfall of investing in features that don’t solve actual problems. Tony Fadell, the designer of the first iPod and Nest thermostats, has said that a good product should be like a painkiller, not a vitamin—it should address a real, pressing problem. You might think a feature is innovative, but until you see how people genuinely use it, you won’t know if it’s needed. Skipping this validation phase can lead to a product loaded with unnecessary features that ultimately miss the mark with users.
Imagine: You’re tasked with designing a to-do list app. What will set your app apart from the dozens of others on the market? Inspired, your team spends a year developing the most advanced to-do list app imaginable—complete with complex sorting options, color-coding, and tagging features. But when launch day comes, the feedback is surprising: users feel overwhelmed and frustrated by all the options. What they really wanted was something simpler than competing apps—just a clean, easy-to-use list. It’s the kind of insight that could have been uncovered early through observation, saving months of development effort and keeping the product aligned with user needs.
Prototyping is a critical tool in early validation, as it allows you to put a tangible, though simplified, version of your product in front of users. However, observing behavior is often more valuable than simply asking for opinions. Research on choice blindness—the phenomenon where people struggle to accurately explain their preferences—shows that what users say they want often doesn’t align with how they actually behave. This is why it’s important to watch how they interact with your prototype: Are they navigating it as intended, or getting stuck? Are certain features being ignored, or do users behave in unexpected ways? Paying attention to these patterns reveals pain points and opportunities that wouldn’t surface through direct feedback alone.
Ultimately, early validation isn’t about creating a final product; it’s about setting a direction based on real-world insights. Early validation provides the clarity and confidence needed to move forward with a product that truly resonates with users. That’s why Mass Productive includes concept validation as a key part of our Review service—it’s how we help you identify what works, what doesn’t, and where to focus your efforts before making major investments. If you’d like to discuss how your concept could benefit from this approach, we’d be happy to share what we’ve learned and explore how we can help your product start off on the right foot.