What Is Product Management Hypothesis?

What Is Product Management Hypothesis?

The path to creating a great product can be riddled with unknowns.

To create a successful product that delivers value to customers, product teams grapple with many questions such as:

• Who is our ideal customer?
• What is the most important product feature to build?
• Will customers like a specific feature?

Using a scientific process for product management can help funnel these assumptions into actionable and specific hypotheses. Then, teams can validate their ideas and make the product more valuable for the end-user.

In this article, we’ll learn more about the product management hypothesis and how it can help create successful products consistently.

Product management hypothesis definition

Product management hypothesis is a scientific process that guides teams to test different product ideas and evaluate their merit. It helps them prioritize their finite energy, time, development resources, and budget.

To create hypotheses, product teams can be inspired by multiple sources, including:

• Observations and events happening around them
• Personal opinions of team members
• Earlier experiences of building and launching a different product
• An evaluation and assessment that leads to the identification of unique patterns in data

The most creative ideas can come when teams collaborate. When ideas are identified and expanded, they become hypotheses.

How does the product management hypothesis work?

A method has as many variations as its users. The product management hypothesis has evolved over the years, but here is a brief outline of how it works.

1. Identify an idea, assumption, or observation.
2. Question the idea or observation to learn more about it.
3. Create an entire hypothesis and explain the idea, observation, or assumption.
4. Outline a prediction about the hypothesis.
5. Test the prediction.
6. Review testing results to iterate and create new hypotheses

Product management hypothesis checklist

When time is limited, teams cannot spend too long creating a hypothesis.

That’s why having a well-planned product management checklist can help in identifying good hypotheses quickly. A good hypothesis is an idea or assumption that:

• Is believed to be true, but whose merit needs to be assessed
• Can be tested in many ways
• Is expected to occur in the near future
• Can be true or false
• Applies to the ideal end-users of the product
• Is measurable and identifiable

Product management hypothesis example

Here’s a simple template to outline your product management hypothesis:

• The core idea, assumption, or observation 
• The potential impact this idea will have
• Who will this idea impact the most?
• What will be the estimated volume and nature of the impact?
• When will the idea and its impact occur? 

Here’s an example of a product management hypothesis:

• Idea: We want to redesign the web user interface for a SaaS product to increase conversions
• Potential impact: This redesign targets to increase conversions for new users 
• The audience of impact: Showcase the redesign only to new users to understand the impact on conversions (there’s no point in showing this to existing users since the goal here is new user conversions)
• Impact volume: The targeted volume of the redesign-led conversions will be 35%
• Time period: The redesign testing would take three weeks, starting from August 15

Stop guessing which feature or product to prioritize and build. Use the product management hypothesis as a guide to finding your next successful product or feature ideas. 

Get a free Wrike trial to create more products that deliver business impact and delight your customers.