Personal Blog of Patrick Sauerwein

I recently had the pleasure of supporting and speaking at the first Crafting Product conference in Darmstadt, hosted by Cosee. The conference focused on the topic of “Clarity through Product Discovery,” and was conducted entirely in German, with talks running in a single track.

This experience has inspired me to start writing again, sharing actionable insights from my professional journey. In this blog post, I’d like to introduce the concept of Test and Learning Cards as a valuable tool for product teams.

Try Test Cards: Validating Hypotheses

Test cards provide a structured approach to experimenting and validating hypotheses. They help address the following key questions:

1. What needs to be true for your idea(s) to work? (Hypothesis, assumption, or simply a 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?

By clearly articulating these elements, test cards enable product teams to move conversations beyond features and ideas, and focus on validating the underlying assumptions.

Try Learning Cards: Capturing Insights

Complementing the test cards, learning cards help teams explicitly capture and document their learnings:

1. Which hypotheses did you go out to test?
2. What did you observe, discover, or learn in the field?
3. What insights did you gain from the experiment?
4. How will you act upon these learnings to improve your business model and value proposition ideas?

The structured format of learning cards encourages teams to reflect on their experiments, extract valuable insights, and use them to inform their next steps.

Putting Test and Learning Cards into Practice

You can start incorporating test and learning cards into your product development process right away. You can create a physical Post-It board or integrate them into your preferred digital tool, such as EPICs or User Stories.

Introduce the cards to your product team(s) and encourage them to fill them out as part of their ongoing work. Present the cards in conversations with stakeholders, inviting their input and perspectives. This structured approach will help shift the focus from features to outcomes, and deepen the common understanding within the team.

My most important takeaway

Introducing test and learning cards as a tool for you or more product teams are super-valuable to move conversations from feature to outcomes.

By introducing these cards to your product team(s), discussions naturally evolve in a more meaningful direction. Additionally, they help externalize underlying assumptions, fostering a deeper shared understanding among team members.

Beyond Features: Towards Problem-Solution and Product-Market Fit

Test and learning cards are just one piece of the puzzle in “escaping the build trap” and moving towards true product-market fit. They help you match problem-solution fit and mature your product offering and encourage conversations to transcend mere features, ideas, as well as solution-oriented thinking.

I’ll share more thoughts on problem-solution and product-market fit in a future blog post. For now, I encourage you to explore the concept of test and learning cards and see how they can benefit your product development efforts.

For further insights, I recommend exploring the Value Proposition Design book or library of Strategyzer.

Share your experiences

Do you have any experiences with test and learning cards? If so, I invite you to share them in the comments or reach out directly.

Thank you for reading!

Patrick