SoLoMoFoo Validating Assumptions

This is the fifth part of our Illustrated Guide to Product Development series. Throughout this series we have extended a product idea into a business concept, the beginning of a Go-to-Market Plan and developed personas to correspond to all of these parts. We have also warned repeatedly that the biggest risk a company, new product or service has is making something nobody wants. In this article we are going to dissect a few assumptions we have made, how they impact our work, and how we can test them. Many of the aspects of our business plan require the previous assumption to be true, but if all of a sudden the previous assumption is false, large parts of future work can and should be skipped.