GuideBeginner

Product Discovery And Prototyping

Teaches how to validate a bet with real users before building it. Building is the most expensive way to learn; this guide buys cheap evidence about risky assumptions before spending weeks of engineering time. It covers continuous discovery as a habit, not a one-time phase; interviews that don't lie — asking about past behavior, not future intentions, following the Mom Test approach; the opportunity solution tree for mapping the problem before jumping to a solution; turning an assumption into a falsifiable hypothesis and designing the cheapest test that can refute it (the riskiest assumption test); prototyping at the right fidelity level — paper, clickable, wizard-of-oz, fake door; avoiding confirmation bias and the say-do gap; and synthesizing findings to decide whether to continue, pivot, or kill the bet. It picks up exactly where the Product Thinking guide left off: Mercado's `recommendations` bet, with its riskiest assumption already identified but untested. All the decision logic — which test to pick, how to weigh evidence, how to update confidence — runs as executed Node.js code. It closes with a capstone project that validates that bet end to end.