A Product Manager’s guide to Painted-Door Tests | by Curtis Stanier | Medium

As Product Managers, one of the many difficult questions we need to answer is, “what should I build”? Most Product Development approaches involve A/B, or multivariant tests, as a way of validating the new variation improves the metric you intended to without adverse effect. However, sometimes even A/B tests have a daunting scope requiring large amount of engineering or other investment to validate. Enter the painted-door test. A painted-door test, sometimes called a fake-door or smoke-tests, is a method of early testing to gauge if your users would engage with a particular feature — it primarily focuses on tracking the completion of a main call-to-action. It is a way of exposing a partially or non-functional feature to your users to test their level of interest. This allows you to validate if this is something a customer truly wants in your product, or if you need to reevaluate the idea. The name comes from a technique used in building architecture and design. Fake windows are added to

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• Chieh Yuan