Think About The Pain

Photo credit: wolfgangfoto (Creative Commons)

I watched a while ago a great video from Michael Skok. There he mentioned interesting thing about new products. That’s Gain & Pain. Which were defined as:

Gain – The gain delivered to customer

Pain – The pain and cost for the customer to adopt

I thought about this from the perspective of testing and it felt like a good heuristic to consider while testing.

Think about the pain of adopting a product or feature.

It can be re-planning business process, providing training and training material related to new product, more work for people who are handling orders (because new product has helped in increasing the amount of orders), more work for people who are at help desk (to support people who are struggling with the new product), recruiting more people, investing on software licenses, users realizing that they’re not the subject-matter experts anymore for the new product, migrating existing production data into the new product…

And so on.

There’s probably often (if not always) pain when new products (or features) are being adopted. Try to think whose lives the product (or feature) will touch. Not just the end customers, but also the people (e.g. admins) who work behind the curtains.

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