Conducting experiments with the scientific method
Traditionally, requirements management was more guesswork than science. The closest that came to a scientific approach were interviews or market research in general. The problem with this approach is that you cannot ask people what they do not yet know. You can ask them what they want but not what they need, as they probably won’t know that yet, especially in a market segment that gets disrupted.
The idea of hypothesis-driven development is to apply the scientific method to product management, an empirical method of acquiring evidence-based knowledge.
The scientific method is a process of experimentation used to explore observations and answer questions that aim to discover cause-and-effect relationships. It follows certain process steps (see Figure 19.1):
Figure 19.1 – The scientific method
We will look at the various steps in detail: