Guest View: Use hackathons to validate your product

You assume you’ve a terrific product. Your product supervisor thinks you’ve a terrific product. Your builders assume they’ve created a terrific product. The query is – how do you show this earlier than you ship it out to your alpha and beta testers for real-world suggestions?

Subsequently, we advocate the multistage hackathon strategy to make sure product-market match and usefulness. With multistage hackathons, you can begin them sooner than the “remaining product” stage to get extra helpful suggestions. Whereas the “remaining product” stage just isn’t as nicely outlined in our days of agile growth and CI/CD, we’re defining “remaining product” as one thing that’s usually agreed upon to be prepared for market launch.

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However, utilizing a sequence of hackathons could make it simpler to confirm that you’re fixing the purchasers’ downside that you simply supposed to unravel. What you assume you completed within the lab isn’t all the time the case in the true world. Use hackathons to inject a little bit of the “actual world” within the growth course of.

You wish to have at the least three hackathons for 3 important causes: 1) You gained’t catch everybody in a given day. 2) You gained’t catch every thing in a given day. 3) You want time to iterate and incorporate suggestions.

Particular person preparation

Hackathon #1 must deal with the use-case stage. For instance, you need somebody to check a automotive by driving to a selected location. Throughout hackathon #1, you give them GPS and detailed directions.

For Hackathon #2, the duty is identical, however as an alternative of GPS and directions, you give them a street atlas and a few verbal instructions. Hackathon #2 is extra of a guided, end-to-end take a look at.

Hackathon #3 is a real, open-ended usability take a look at. Hand them the automotive keys and inform them to get to the vacation spot. The purpose of hackathon #3 is to find out whether or not, with none particular steering, the consumer can simply obtain the target utilizing the product. This permits them to spend extra time exploring and comprehensively stress-testing the applying.