Why you should never use traditional surveys for idea validation

One of the best ways that you can guarantee product failure is by using a traditional survey tool like SurveyMonkey, Typeform or Google Forms to validate your product idea. Even though they're cheap, easy-to-use and widely known, there are a number of reasons why these traditional surveys lead product builders down the wrong path time and time again.

Let's take a look at why you should never use traditional surveys for new product development:

Surveys can't tell you which problems are most important

People are really bad at knowing what they need. The best product builders know this and never use feature requests to inform product decisions — instead they understand that feature requests are just problems wrapped up as solutions by customers. If you can dig into those requests to understand the problem the customer is trying to solve, you're much more likely to build a solution that solves the problem for all users.

Identifying and solving the biggest problem for the largest group of customers is at the heart of all product management, but figuring out which problems are the most important to customers is a lot harder than it sounds. Rather than just using a multiple choice question to get people to vote on which problems they have, you really need to understand the relative importance of each problem by comparing them to each other.

Differentiating between burning problems and mild inconveniences is exactly what OpinionX is built to do. Rather than getting people to tick the box on problems they have, OpinionX uses comparison-based voting to stack rank all your potential problems based on highest importance so that you can focus on solving your most impactful customer pain points.

Surveys lock you in with your blind spots at the start

Quantifiable data is key to informing good decision-making. When it comes to building new products or features, we all have blind spots in what we know and biases in what we think we know. Therefore, we rely on research techniques to learn new insights that we can use to fill those blind spots and overcome those biases.

With a traditional survey, finding these insights generally means using an open-ended question to gather written text responses. However, when it comes to decision-making, these open-ended responses can quickly lead you astray; instead of searching for the most impactful problem our users are facing, we end up chasing the most common answer that was submitted.

OpinionX gives you the best of both — discover new insights and quantify our results for better decision-making. Participants add new problem statements to your survey to fill in the gaps you missed at the start. In over 80% of OpinionX stack ranks, these new opinions end up in the top 3 most important problems. If you use a traditional survey, you'll miss out on these hidden insights.

Surveys can't adapt once you've discovered something new

Building a new product or feature is an iterative process. You run an experiment, learn from the results and update your hypothesis. The faster you can run this iterative loop, the more likely you'll reach success.

Having used traditional surveys a bunch of times for new product development, there's nothing quite as frustrating as getting your first batch of responses and realizing that your initial hypothesis is wrong or your survey is missing a key topic. With traditional surveys, there's nothing you can do except start again.

Because OpinionX surveys are built to grow by letting participants add new opinions to your voting list, it also means that you can add new opinions too. This means that OpinionX surveys are dynamic — as you learn from the data your survey collects, you can add new opinions to test emerging hypotheses as you go. Dive deeper into the real problems your users face without the need for multiple different surveys.

Discover your users' biggest problems

Use OpinionX to stack rank your customer’s biggest unmet needs, pains and desires so that you can achieve Product/Market Fit faster. It’s free (no credit card required and takes less than 5 minutes to get started.