Beyond Feedback: The Path to True Product Validation
Feedback tells you what customers think they want; validation shows what they'll actually use.
The Costly Confusion
What does true validation look like? How do you know when you've genuinely validated your product, feature, or business opportunity?
Over the years I have observed countless product teams and entrepreneurs celebrating user feedback as "validation," only to discover months and millions of rands later that they built something nobody wanted. This common misconception leads to wasted resources, failed products, and frustrated teams.
Validation should never be an elusive destination where team members don't recognize what it looks like, when they're approaching it, or which signs indicate they're on the right path. Instead, it should be a deliberate journey with clear milestones and a definitive endpoint.
Defining the Difference
The distinction between feedback and validation is crucial yet frequently misunderstood:
Feedback
Is information that has not been processed or interpreted. It represents raw data in the form of opinions, preferences, and reactions to how people experience a product or service.
It's reactive, that is people respond to something you've already conceptualized or created.
Validation,
Is a systematic process of verifying whether a product will solve an existing problem adequately enough for people to pay for it and for a sustainable business to be built around it.
It is a proactive framework where you gather measurable proof that confirms or refutes specific business hypotheses about user behavior, market demand, and willingness to adopt.
The simplest way to understand the distinction:
Feedback is an input – a data point collected along the journey
Validation is a process – the entire journey with a clear destination and a map
This distinction isn't merely semantic. It fundamentally changes how you evaluate product viability.
Why This Distinction Matters
The implications of this distinction go far beyond semantics. In my work with both startups and enterprise clients, I have seen how confusing feedback for validation leads to:
Building features nobody wants
Extending development timelines unnecessarily
Misallocating valuable engineering resources
Making critical business decisions based on insufficient evidence
CLASSIC EXAMPLE: You collect enthusiastic feedback on a new product from various focus groups. Based on this "validation," you decide to invest 18 months in development. After launch, actual usage is minimal. What you had was positive feedback on a concept, not validation of a solution people would integrate into their lives. The difference between mere feedback and validation lies in having a clearly defined and documented validation strategy that yields actionable insights and signals.
The Validation Journey
.Your validation strategy should include the following:
Clearly defined goals and hypotheses: Articulate the value proposition and document assumptions about your target audience and market.
Identified core assumptions: Determine which critical assumptions must be true for your product idea to evolve into a sustainable business.
Diverse validation methods: Utilise various approaches including surveys, interviews, prototyping, and minimum viable products to gather comprehensive insights.
Predetermined success criteria: Establish specific thresholds that indicate validation success and measure results against these standards.
Iteration framework: Define how validation insights will be used to refine the product concept before proceeding to full development.
Recognising True Validation
How do you know when you've achieved validation? Look for these signals:
Achievement of predefined success criteria: You've reached or exceeded the metrics you established before beginning validation activities.
Confirmation of problem-solution fit: People are engaging with and using your product or service, even in its most rudimentary form.
Consistent patterns across methods: Results from different validation approaches confirm recurring insights, indicating convergence and sufficient understanding.
Reduced business risks: Your team has successfully mitigated technical, demand, user experience, adoption, and business model viability risks.
Strategic Validation: A Balanced Approach
I advocate for what I call "strategic validation” which is a more nuanced approach to validation:
Understand the progression of creating a business from a product idea. What most founders will always start with is an idea, which they then need to move to a concept that can be visualised in some form, and documented. From there you move to building a business case through systematic validation.
Validate assumptions, not ideas. List all the assumptions that need to be true in order for your product to achieve product-market fit. Break down concepts into their component assumptions and prioritis
e testing the riskiest ones.
Match validation depth to risk exposure. Not all features or decisions warrant the same validation investment, in terms of time and effort.
Set validation time boxes. Establish hard limits on validation cycles to prevent analysis paralysis.
Diversify validation methods. Different approaches reveal different insights and combine quantitative data, qualitative feedback, and behavioural observation.
Build validation into execution. The best validation often happens through progressive deployment rather than pre-development testing.
Moving Forward with Confidence
True validation gives you the confidence to proceed with product development knowing you're building something people need and will use. It transforms uncertainty into calculated risk and replaces guesswork with evidence.
Ready to implement a proper validation strategy for your next product initiative?
Download my free Validation Workbook or book a free consultation call with me if you would like feedback or assistance on your validation strategy or approach..