The A-team's guide to organizing the perfect product testing session

Finding our collective spark in the heart of the Atlantic

Every year, the globe-trotting tribe of Team Amplemarket gathers for our much-anticipated all-company offsite. 

Last year's memories from the Canary Islands still linger fresh, but this year, we sought a new horizon — Funchal, Madeira. As a remote-first company, these offsites are the cornerstone of our culture. They're our yearly ritual to bridge distances, foster connections, and ignite creativity through shared experiences. 

And what could be better than converging our collective intellect to tackle product challenges, all while soaking in the spirit of Madeira?

One of our favorite sessions during the offsite was our company-wide product testing session, where we invited all members of the team to complete a series of tasks through our very own platform. 

In this blog, we’ll share more about how we planned for the product testing event, our takeaways from this year’s session, and our tips on how to arrange a similarly successful session for your company!

Goals of a product testing session

When we set out to plan our product testing session, we knew we weren't just looking to unearth bugs or pinpoint improvements; we were looking to engage the entire team on a journey of exploration and innovation.

The primary goals of our product testing session were:

1. To gather valuable feedback and insights from users that could inform our improvements in the product

2. To shed light on potential pain-points or user experience issues.

We broke these down to work out how we we go about structuring the session and get the results we needed. Some more specific objectives to we had in mind were:

• To validate our product concepts: Test the viability and desirability of our product features or concepts.
• Gain better visibility over pain-points in real-time: Uncover usability issues that users encounter whilst navigating the platform or completing tasks, but might not think to flag.
• Gather data on usability: Collect qualitative and quantitative usability data to measure our user experience.
• Engage the A-team: Foster engagement and collaboration across teams to bolster our shared sense of ownership and curious optimism towards the product!

Setting the stage for discovery: steps to plan your product testing session

With our overall objectives in mind, we moved on to practical reparation.

Check out our step-by-step guide to planning a winning product session - and how we tackled the project:

1. Define your mission

Clearly define the goals and objectives of your testing session as we did above. Are there specific aspects of the product you want to evaluate? What precise insights do you hope to gain?

Each of our meticulously-designed product testing stations spotlighting a specific facet of the Amplemarket platform to ensure we could dive deep into every area of the platform.

2. Select participants

Identify the target audience for the product testing session. Choose participants who represent your target user demographic and ensure diversity in backgrounds and perspectives.

We are in an unusual position in that our team ranges from product power users (sellers who use Amplemarket everyday), to very infrequent users, which gives us the opportunity to explore our product experience from a wide range of perspectives.

3. Create test scenarios

Develop realistic and relevant test scenarios that allow participants to interact with the product in various ways. Design tasks that align with the objectives of the testing session and simulate real-world usage scenarios.

We assigned directly responsible individuals (DRIs) from the Product, Customer Success, and Engineering teams who were responsible for planning and scripting a series of 4-5 related tasks on each product station, starting from easy and becoming more complex. 

4. Prepare materials 

Gather all necessary materials and resources for the testing session, including prototypes, testing devices, feedback forms, and any other relevant documentation. 

A pro tip we quickly learned: always check your equipment beforehand to ensure you’re ready to capture every golden moment of feedback!

5. Facilitate the session

It’s important you give your choice of testing environment some thought and that you look for a setting that is conducive to free, open communication and collaboration. 

We opted for an evening session during our company offsite to maximize team involvement and ensure everyone was relaxed. With cold beers in hand and laughter in the air, delving deeper into our product together became great fun and didn't feel like work at all!

6. Collect feedback

Think about how you’re going to collect and record participants’ feedback and insights as they interact with the product. We recommend using a combination of observation, interviews, and recordings to gather both qualitative and quantitative data.

As participants moved from station to station, we recorded their activities and time on each task to compare ease of usability and efficiency. During the session, these helpers were on-hand to monitor participants’ progress, gather observational feedback, and offer assistance (but only when absolutely necessary!)

7. Analyze results

After the testing session, analyze the collected data to identify patterns, trends, and areas for improvement. From this, you can identify quick fixes or make a note of areas requiring deeper discovery - and so start to prioritize your next product projects.

We’ve found our product testing sessions hugely insightful when it comes to unveiling unexpected pain-points and challenging our previous assumptions!

8. Complete the circle

Continue engaging your participants after your testing event! This helps ensure users’ pains are being properly addressed, but it also makes them feel involved in your development process. Consider further testing if you identify areas where more data is needed.

Testing, tipples, and laughter

Our testing session was a whirlwind of activity. For ninety minutes, the room buzzed with energy as team members migrated from station to station, each participant bringing their unique perspective. 

Spanning departments from marketing to finance, our diverse team uncovered a wealth of insights, revealing challenges within our product flows that we'd never seen before and giving our development teams much food for thought!

From insight to action

Post-session, we gathered our discoveries — a treasure trove of feedback, pain points, and ingenious quick fixes. This feedback was promptly shared with the relevant teams and reignited our excitement to refine and enhance our solution. 

Here were some of our top takeaways from the event:

• Early engagement is key: Involving users early on in the product development process is ideal when it comes to testing and validating assumptions, as well as
• Diversity drives innovation: Having participants with varying levels of experience with your solution (or others similar) helps ensure you capture a wide range of perspectives and insights. Sometimes getting completely fresh eyes on your product experience can be hugely enlightening, especially when it comes to optimizing your onboarding and activation.
• Take an iterative approach: User testing helps support an iterative approach to product development to make sure you are deploying resources and efforts where they’re really needed.
• Participants love to be involved: Whether it’s giving technical feedback or their thoughts on the session as a whole, you can learn a lot from your participants and make them feel more involved in your iteration process.

The art of playful product testing

This product testing session wasn't just about making our products better; it was a testament to our team's spirit, resilience, and collective genius. The success of this session has transformed it from a one-time event into a cherished ritual, putting our curious optimism into action to ensure we’re always making something people want!

We hope you find this blog useful on your product development adventures!

Find out more about our latest product updates here.