Validate your ideas with The Test Card

Alex Osterwalder
March 5, 2015
#
 min read
topics
Testing Business Ideas

The core idea of the Lean Startup movement is to validate your business ideas with customer experiments/tests before scaling them. We came up with a simple tool to better design those experiments/tests, because we weren't good at it in the early days of Strategyzer. Watch the video in this post to learn about the Test Card.

At Strategyzer, we talk to customers a lot and continuously conduct experiments before we launch something new. Yet, in the early days, we didn't learn as much as we should have despite talking to tons of customers. We were all over the place. That's why we invented the Test Card for ourselves.

Get your free Test Card

The tools and resources mentioned in this post are available for FREE in our Knowledge library. Get access to 30+ other tools and resources to help you design a business that your customers will love.

Basically the Test Card forces you to make the following things explicit:

  1. What needs to be true for your idea(s) to work (aka hypothesis, assumption, or simply guess)?
  2. How are you going to test if that hypothesis is true or false?
  3. What are you going to measure to (in)validate your hypothesis?
  4. How does success look like? What's the threshold?

Watch the video below from our enterprise online course on Value Proposition Design in which I explain the Test Card.

Of course you'll need to design and execute many, many Test Cards to validate an idea. We'll show you how to organize these tests with Test Cards, and how to digest them in two follow-up posts. In the next post, we'll introduce you to the Learning Card. We will then introduce the Progress Board, a completely new tool that we've been working on.

What tools do you use to structure your experiments?

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Online course: Mastering business testing

About the speakers

Alex Osterwalder
Entrepreneur, speaker and business theorist

Dr. Alexander (Alex) Osterwalder is one of the world’s most influential innovation experts, a leading author, entrepreneur and in-demand speaker whose work has changed the way established companies do business and how new ventures get started.

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Alex Osterwalder
March 5, 2015
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Validate your ideas with The Test Card
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Validate your ideas with The Test Card

March 5, 2015
#
 min read
topics
Testing Business Ideas

The core idea of the Lean Startup movement is to validate your business ideas with customer experiments/tests before scaling them. We came up with a simple tool to better design those experiments/tests, because we weren't good at it in the early days of Strategyzer. Watch the video in this post to learn about the Test Card.

At Strategyzer, we talk to customers a lot and continuously conduct experiments before we launch something new. Yet, in the early days, we didn't learn as much as we should have despite talking to tons of customers. We were all over the place. That's why we invented the Test Card for ourselves.

Get your free Test Card

The tools and resources mentioned in this post are available for FREE in our Knowledge library. Get access to 30+ other tools and resources to help you design a business that your customers will love.

Basically the Test Card forces you to make the following things explicit:

  1. What needs to be true for your idea(s) to work (aka hypothesis, assumption, or simply guess)?
  2. How are you going to test if that hypothesis is true or false?
  3. What are you going to measure to (in)validate your hypothesis?
  4. How does success look like? What's the threshold?

Watch the video below from our enterprise online course on Value Proposition Design in which I explain the Test Card.

Of course you'll need to design and execute many, many Test Cards to validate an idea. We'll show you how to organize these tests with Test Cards, and how to digest them in two follow-up posts. In the next post, we'll introduce you to the Learning Card. We will then introduce the Progress Board, a completely new tool that we've been working on.

What tools do you use to structure your experiments?

Online course: Mastering business testing
related reads
No items found.
Validate your ideas with The Test Card

The core idea of the Lean Startup movement is to validate your business ideas with customer experiments/tests before scaling them. We came up with a simple tool to better design those experiments/tests, because we weren't good at it in the early days of Strategyzer. Watch the video in this post to learn about the Test Card.

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Validate your ideas with The Test Card
Validate your ideas with The Test Card
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Whether you’re looking for more information or you’re ready to start a project, we’re ready to help.
Thanks for your interest in our solutions. We will be in touch with you soon.