Product testers should keep in mind the important difference between marketing/website testing, which has always been about the ability to "fail faster,” and product testing, where failures are incredibly costly. Because of those costly risks, it’s more important with product testing to fully understand the customer journey—qualitatively and quantitatively—before you make product decisions.

To do that, product testers should take these steps:

1. Utilize extensive research first – both qualitative and quantitative

2. Practice customer empathy to define what success looks like

3. Use rapid experimentation methods to gather evidence to support your build.

The standard product lifecycle is: Build ➡ Measure ➡ Learn (hopefully). However, a sound product experimentation framework, turns that product lifecycle around by first asking the question: What do I want to learn? Then: What would I need to measure to learn that? Last: What would I need to build to measure that? Then, and only then can we start to Build ➡ Measure ➡ Learn ✨guaranteed ✨