When product marketers create a video walkthrough of the complete customer journey for a campaign—from social post to in-product upgrade—they are forced to test every step. This acts as a forcing function for quality assurance, allowing the team to identify friction points or broken links before launch.

Related Insights

Instead of focus groups, the team uses a full rehearsal day where staff and players test new promotions. If the internal team genuinely has fun and enjoys the experience, they know it will resonate with the audience. This "internal fun test" serves as their core product validation method before public launch.

Elevate Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) from tactical to strategic by treating it like a measurement system. A high volume of tests, viewed in context with one another, provides a detailed, high-fidelity understanding of user behavior, much like a 3D scan requires numerous data points for accuracy.

Instead of guarding prototypes, build a library of high-fidelity, interactive demos and give sales and customer success teams free reign to show them to customers. This democratizes the feedback process, accelerates validation, and eliminates the engineering burden of creating one-off sales demos.

During product discovery, Amazon teams ask, "What would be our worst possible news headline?" This pre-mortem practice forces the team to identify and confront potential weak points, blind spots, and negative outcomes upfront. It's a powerful tool for looking around corners and ensuring all bases are covered before committing to build.

Writing detailed documentation is a task most employees avoid. By recording a quick video walkthrough of a process (e.g., how to pull a report), that video can be shared, referenced, and then automatically transcribed by AI into a structured SOP, eliminating the friction of manual writing.

Foster a culture of experimentation by reframing failure. A test where the hypothesis is disproven is just as valuable as a 'win' because it provides crucial user insights. The program's success should be measured by the quantity of quality tests run, not the percentage of successful hypotheses.

As software commoditizes, the buying experience itself becomes a key differentiator. Map the entire customer journey, from awareness to renewal, and design unique, valuable interactions at each stage. This shifts the focus from transactional selling to creating a memorable, human-centric experience that drives purchasing decisions.

The most effective product reviews eliminate all abstractions. Forbid presentations, pre-reads, and storytelling. Instead, force the entire review to occur within the actual prototype or live code. This removes narrative bias and forces an assessment of the work as the customer will actually experience it.

Dogfooding isn't enough. Founders should use every feature of their product weekly to develop a subjective feel for quality. Combine this with objective metrics like the percentage of unhappy customers and the engineering velocity for adding new features.