When creating a product, it's important to start by validating the problem you are trying to solve for your intended audience. However, this crucial step is often overlooked due to innovator's bias.

One of the hardest things for a product team to do is estimate how long it takes to build something. This inability to provide accurate timings can be frustrating for stakeholders, which is completely understandable if they have their own goals and timelines to adhere to. When faced with this challenge, I like to compare our work to going on a car journey.

One of the greatest challenges for a start-up is limited access to resources, particularly when it comes to money and people. This challenge is magnified when you combine it with the inherent risk of building an innovative product. The Salt Test is designed to help with that.

Product innovation is critical for established companies to remain ahead of the competition. This is particularly the case in the modern climate, where the democratisation of technology means that start-ups can disrupt and become market leaders within a few short years.

The core theme behind The Salt Test is defining your riskiest assumptions and then testing them to see if they pass or fail. It is therefore imperative to have a set of numbers that define what constitutes a pass or a fail.

I don’t believe it is an exaggeration to say that getting the right pricing can make or break your product. If there is ever a single number that reflects your product brand and positioning, then it is the price.

In my recent post, I mentioned that you should prioritise your assumptions as you go through each phase of product discovery. However, I didn’t actually explain how to do this.

Lessons Learnt while Playing for England

When it comes to product innovation, it is in the Discovery stage when the real ‘magic’ happens. For me, it is the most exciting of the four stages in the product lifecycle, and it is the foundation of my book, The Salt Test.

Scale is one of the four stages of the product lifecycle and understanding the lifecycle of a product is fundamental in understanding the core principles in The Salt Test.

The positive feedback I have had since announcing the Salt Test has been incredible and humbling. It has led to some fantastic conversations, which often includes a “what next?”. The answer to this comes back to why I wrote The Salt Test in the first place.

I am excited to announce that after three years of writing, my book ‘The Salt Test’ will soon be available to purchase on Amazon.

The full title is ‘The Salt Test: How to take an innovative product from idea to scale’.