Physical Product Validation, Before It's Too Late
- Yoel Frischoff
- Mar 31, 2024
- 7 min read
Updated: Sep 9
De-risking Physical Products
Physical product validation is crucial due to the high costs and inflexibility of hardware development. Market need and positioning analysis are essential, followed by feature validation through mockups, prototypes, and user testing. This process helps identify and prioritize features, ensuring the product meets user needs and aligns with market demands.
Product Management for the Physical World Series: Part VIII
Physical product validation MVP Challenge
An MVP, or a Minimally Viable Product, is a development stage used to create a new product with enough features to attract early adopter customers and validate an idea early in the development cycle.
While software products are easily amenable to this strategy, in part for their modularity and the vast underlying infrastructure in place.
Consider a mobile application, or a web app. Most of what's going on are infrastructures that cater to ALL apps, and are reused innumerable times.
Note how shared web infrastructures, cloud included, are built to serve billions of users (beside your own app users).
It is fair to say app developers stand on the shoulders of giants, and as a result, the pace and scale of innovation they can bring is without match, notably because the infrastructure is built to support multiple tech-stacks and business cases, so that, should you pivot, you are not to loose a lot of the things that make your product tick.
That is not the case with physical products.
The challenge with meaningful MVP creation in hardware products is that, from a functional point of view, they are often integrated monoliths.
By this, I refer to the need to recreate almost every part of critical functional layers, with limited potential for component reuse.
Consider the main subsystems for a typical passenger car. These subsystems are characterized by different availability and development costs.
Notice that with the exemption of infotainment and control systems, the most differentiating factors are also the most expensive parts of any car development.
The lead time and cost of recreation of manufacturing infrastructures and replenish critical inventories for these systems are much too prohibitive, and in fact are equivalent to the launch of a new model altogether.
Passenger cars are at the extreme of this continuum, but in general, physical product face similar rigidity in their development process, meaning that unless they operate within an extremely cash rich environment, physical product innovators have one bullet in their proverbial pistol.
This makes the challenge of early validation even more acute:
How can you experiment?
Can you bring your product in the hands of users, before all costs are sunk?
Problem Validation
"Fall in love with the problem, not the solution" (Uri Levine)
This quotation addresses one of the most common fallacies within early stage product companies: Talented and motivated teams could and frequently would fall into the building stage fast. This is a symptom of a problem known as "a solution in search of a problem".
But whereas pivoting software products might still be possible (at cost), steering massive manufacturing infrastructures efforts oftentimes proves impossible. Usually there is not enough time, and not enough money to change course.
Validation, therefore, is key to success. But how does one do that?
Market need and Positioning
First and foremost comes a sound understanding of the market dynamics (size and trends), the competitive landscape, the customers' needs, and hopefully, existing gaps in the market.
This includes the study of the competition's features, language and messaging, which will result in a set of positioning maps, organizing the "lines of battle" along messaging aimed to influence prospective customers' minds when they think about their problems and the solution they would like to pick.
Consider the following perceptual map for the smartphone market, which is centered around "feature - like" qualities: the available range of models, and the perceived level of technology integrated into the brand's product.
Were you a product manager for Pixel 7a in this example, you should be worried about the perception of your brand within the surveilled audience. There is a gap between the group of leaders and the rest - and your product is lagging.
If I were a product manager with Pixel 8Pro, I'd be thinking really hard how to build up performance and camera quality, to move further up the leaderboard.
Such perceptual maps help us understand our place (for existing brands), or where do we want to be, when planning new products. They show us what are the needs important to users and customers within the market segments we're after, therefore enabling us to design features tailored to better cater to them.
Feature scoping by competitive analysis
Another method entails conducting a competitive feature review. Consider the article by Insight Quantum, listing key features and their relative scores, as in this table:
The table can be translated into a spider graph:
When building a product, in contrast to marketing it, such competitive analysis is used to identify the areas where we want to shine, so that we can create our positioning statement and value proposition: In this example, a humorous one could be: "Crash safely with the music blasting on" – positioning Kia Seltos as the safest car with the best infotainment system.
Feature validation
The crucial part of the process is validation of the insights we gained:
First we identify and prioritize the features according to our positioning
These feature may be contradictory (such as performance vs. fuel efficiency)
We then stack the differentiating features on top of the conventional, foundational ones
Now we find a way to present these features to users, and have them experience them to the best of our ability.
For instance, we can generally only tell consumers of the average fuel consumption, once tested in controlled environment to an industry agreed benchmark.
Oftentimes we use mockups for the look and feel.
CAF (Construcciones y Auxiliar de Ferrocarriles) is a spanish company which manufactures railway vehicles and equipment and buses.
Catering to the public transportation sector, their process includes bidding for open or close tenders, in which they present mockups showing their vision for the design and usability of the railroad car - ticking the boxes for the particular demands of the tender at hand.
In this mockup for the NS sprinter series, for Dutch operator Nederlandse Spoorwegen, CAF shows the bodywork, as well as interiors, including electric sockets for passengers' devices, separate trash bins and toilets.
They have focus groups (including target users and customer representatives) experience this solution first hand, gage their responses, and draw necessary conclusions translated into design modifications
It is no small feat, either. Building a similar mockup can take nearly a year and cost up to a million euros. But once the green light is given, the manufacturer can confidently proceed with their multi-billion-euro project, which includes:
Investments in manufacturing equipment
Tooling
Logistics (inventory provisioning for components and raw materials)
Limitations of user feedback
Of course, not every feature can be validated through mockups or public trials. To most users, the technicalities of drivetrains, energy consumption, or HVAC systems are little more than “tech babble.”
Testing these in public would be nearly impossible, since most trial-and-error takes place in labs or on the factory floor, far from user experience.
Instead, these aspects are validated through proof-of-concepts carried out by the vendor under the oversight of the tender issuer, and are later bolstered through technical specifications and performance guarantees contractually committed, often as part of multi-decade operation agreements.
Together, these approaches highlight the dual nature of validation: user-facing features of look and feel are tested and refined through direct experience, while technical features are validated through experimentation, industry standards, and contractual commitments. Both dimensions are essential to building trust in complex products.
The importance of Look & Feel
Unboxing
It often begins with the much-hyped unboxing – a ritual celebrated endlessly on YouTube. And yet, in practice, it is fleeting: consumers perform it once, then toss the packaging or stash it away. Still, this first encounter carries disproportionate weight.
Unboxing is not just about packaging; it is the orchestrated journey of first impressions – when users touch the product, feel its weight, and form an instinctive judgment of quality and value. In software, we call this onboarding, or the Aha! moment.
In hardware, unboxing compresses that same dynamic into a tactile, sensory instant where the brand promise must materialize.
Killer Features
What makes the moment powerful is not the box itself, but whether the product delivers. The magic of great products is that they go beyond a checklist of features: they create trust and desire in ways no spec sheet can.
Consider the first iPhone. Its slab form factor wasn’t preordained; it was chosen after the team carved and carried wooden block mockups, testing proportions until one felt right. More radically, Apple abandoned the physical keyboard altogether – an iconoclastic move, softened by skeuomorphic interface details that made glass feel vivid and tactile.
The result was a “magic keyboard” that clicked and responded without moving parts – improving reliability, lowering costs, and avoiding the dust and grime of old keypads.
Or the MacBook Air, revealed by Steve Jobs as he slid it from a manila envelope. That single gesture dramatized its essence: Portability.
Apple had stripped away the CD-ROM drive and bet on wireless connectivity, making thinness and battery life the new benchmarks. The first impression wasn’t about processor speed or memory – it was about how impossibly light and portable it felt.
In both cases, the unboxing moment was more than packaging. It was the stage where breakthrough design choices – a keyboardless phone, a paper-thin laptop – announced themselves not as abstract features, but as visceral experiences users could feel from the very first touch.
And boy! what validation they must have had to do, what with the razor sharp focus on portability, ditching CDROM drive, and almost accidentally launching the connected device revolution, for what is a laptop worth, if it is not its connectivity, portability, and its ample energy store – features that turned heads then, and do still today.
Conclusion
In this installment, I reiterate the urgent need for early validation for physical products, and discuss strategies for such validation, focusing on differentiating aspects of the product at hand, making necessary shortcuts.
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