One of the key problems experienced by product teams is that they’re not well-versed in the techniques of prototyping & experimenting with ideas.
Not only that, but they don’t often know what options even exist. And there are many! Yet, there’s no one place where one would go to find them all. There’s no body of knowledge that defines what the ways to experiment are.
You don’t necessarily have to A/B test everything, and A/B testing is not often possible. (Besides, experiment design is a serious topic. Many teams hope that it’ll just work itself out when we look at the data.)
However, it is crucial for all businesses and ideas to be tested. It’s the Lean Startup way, and after discovering even a few approaches, I doubt anyone would want to go back to much guesswork.
David J. Bland and Alex Osterwalder came out with a great new book on testing business ideas (affiliate link).

It’s my favorite in the series, because it talks at length about all the various ways to discover, test & validate ideas.
This has been my great interest for over 5 years now.
But of course, a book cannot give you a good way to sort through all the various ways, though they try.
I’ve compiled all the experiments, split between Discovery & Validation (i.e. pre-work & post-work).
Below are tests that have the best evidence strength, are the cheapest and have low run times.
Enjoy – and if you want to see more of this data, hit the button below!
Discovery Experiments
Lowest Cost
Top Evidence Strength
Shortest Run Time
Validation Experiments
Lowest Cost
Top Evidence Strength
Shortest Run Time
Roadmap
- Provide links to practical way to run each experiment
- Run case studies with each experiment on this site