Validate your ideas fast and cheap

In this episode of Datadrivet, Joni Lindgren and Jasmin Yaya talk to Tom Airaksinen, Product Owner at PE Accounting. The episode covers cheap prototypes, short interviews and quick surveys. He is about to give the Product Management Festival talk “Scrappy Mixed Methods: The Resource-Strapped PM’s Guide to Getting Data-Informed.”

Mixed methods means combining quantitative and qualitative ways of gathering insight. Scrappy means getting real work done without expensive tools or senior specialists.

Tom came up as a UX designer focused on qualitative work. He then picked up quantitative methods and moved toward product management. His recommendation for anyone in product: learn SQL so you can query the database yourself.

Tom frames the Product Owner role with a Crisp definition: the main job is “maximizing the amount of work not done.”

Tom saw that the existing features did not meet user needs around expense and travel logging. He built a simple prototype to test the hypothesis.

During the pandemic, user research pointed toward manager approval of expenses (expense attestation), so the team pivoted there. A 25-minute Teams interview dug into why managers wanted this on mobile. Push notifications let a manager approve an expense without checking work email on vacation.

To get scale on the signal, Tom ran Hotjar popup surveys on relevant pages. He collected hundreds of responses in days. “Would you like to approve/attest invoices via mobile?” was double-barreled, asking two things at once, so the answers were hard to trust.

For sorting feedback, Tom uses three buckets: dismiss it as an anomaly, flag it for more investigation, or accept it as valuable.

Cheap prototypes, short interviews, and quick surveys get you most of the way. That holds as long as you ask clean questions and stay honest about what each signal means.

Listen to the full episode of Datadrivet for Tom’s account of validating ideas without a big toolset.