The 1 Thing to Try When Your Product Hypothesis Is Stuck

Let's turn the box upside down

🌅 The thoughts hidden in our New Year's resolutions

The new year of 2024 is here. (I started writing this post with that thought, but Lunar New Year has already passed. Haha!)

What goals did you set for yourself this year?

I made it my goal to record my good habits and thoughts every day. Some of you might have decided to get healthier and started working out, while others might have promised to spend more meaningful time with loved ones and are currently looking into travel destinations.

When chatting with friends or coworkers about New Year's resolutions, don't you ever suddenly realize, "Ah, so this is the kind of life they want to live"? The reason is probably that our New Year's resolutions contain a certain hypothesis that ties directly into our life values.

If I were to extract the hypotheses I see in those previous goals,

Thoughts like these might be hiding underneath. Of course, the kind of life each person wants to achieve will differ depending on their own life goals and values. Just like this, if you dig really deep into the immediate goals set for this year, you can see the ideal life each of us desires.

It's the same for products. Alarmy has a dream to give people a successful morning! It's a very ultimate goal, much like the 'happy life' we dream of. To get there, we are crystallizing sub-goals for waking people up better and helping them sleep better.

Among these, the Morning squad—which is in charge of "waking people up better"—has been operating under the big goal of "making users' mornings successful" for the past year and a half. Then, heading into the new year of 2024, we ended up changing the hypothesis for setting our squad goals. It's a very small change, but it made a massive difference. I'd like to gently share the journey of agony and eureka regarding why and how we shifted such a massive hypothesis.

Internal screaming

🎯 Morning's first mission: Make tomorrow morning successful!

The top-level goal of the Morning squad was "making users' mornings successful." What is the more ultimate dream hidden inside this goal?

If we dig into it like a New Year's resolution,

We can reach "living the life they want" like this. Beyond simply waking people up, changing tomorrow morning, the next month, and ultimately their lives is Alarmy's ultimate vision.

Now let's get a bit more realistic! I'll rephrase the sentence above from the perspective of the Morning squad building the product.

In other words, the first product hypothesis the Morning squad wanted to validate was this.

Okay! The Morning squad just needs to focus on helping users wake up well and have a refreshing morning. 😉

For a period spanning a year and a half, we worked on things that would help users wake up better the next day and enjoy a more refreshing morning. We created a feature called 'Morning Score' that quantified a successful morning as a metric, telling users with a number how well they woke up on the first try, prompting them to check their qualitative mood, and stacking this data so they could see their weekly trends. We also added this score to the post-alarm dismissal flow so they could reflect on their condition right after waking up. For users who struggle to wake up, we added features one by one to ensure they definitely get out of bed.

As these new features kept rolling in, the number of users viewing the 'successful morning metric' screen gradually increased.

👠 I Lost My Way (ft. IU)

Now that we had built a metric system for a successful morning, all that was left was to add even more features for an even more! refreshing and even more! successful morning.

However, we slowly started hitting the brakes when trying to derive and execute new hypotheses.

The things people need for a successful morning are infinitely diverse for each person. There were countless references with themes like #MiracleMorning and #MorningRoutine, but with so many options, there wasn't a single idea that gave us the confidence to say, 'Over 50% of users will need this feature!' If we tried to embrace everything, the feature became ridiculously complicated, and if we simply tried to solve a single problem, it turned into a feature for way too small of a niche.

What should we do

I realized we needed to rethink this from the beginning. Staring at the 'Morning Score Weekly Chart' made by the Morning squad, I imagined the graphs of people having successful mornings. How exactly should this graph look for it to be a successful morning?

The closer the Morning Score is to 100, the closer it is to what Alarmy considers a successful morning.

Let's imagine a person who struggles to wake up and has a hard time starting every day just started using Alarmy for the first time.

If that person starts having increasingly successful mornings with Alarmy's help, we could say our goal has been achieved.

But what if they are already having perfect mornings every day? It's hard to get any better than that. Unless Alarmy adds a new feature and shouts, 'You have to do this too for it to be perfect!' But obviously, we can't just infinitely add features forever.

Conversely, even someone who has successful mornings every day will have days when they don't. The weather might be bad, they might go on a business trip, or they could catch the flu. (Just like me in December.) If they have a slightly subpar morning on such a day, Alarmy has to give them feedback saying they were 'less successful.' Is this really what we want?

🕵️ The answer was already in the question

I temporarily erased the 100-point line and looked at the chart from a distance.

The Morning squad's primary goal was getting people to use Alarmy repeatedly, right?

Ah, but wait, this person is already using Alarmy consistently, aren't they?

More than the ups and downs of the line or how close it is to 100 points, it's about keeping this chart going without a break.

Isn't consistently maintaining their own pattern exactly what we're hoping for?

I realized that rather than making tomorrow immediately more successful, getting them to wake up with Alarmy again tomorrow, even if it's not perfect, might need to come first. For users who already use Alarmy frequently, we remind them how valuable and amazing that consistency is; for users who have only used it a little, we let them imagine the changes that will come if they use Alarmy every day. That way, even if they don't have a perfect morning from day one, they'll find themselves gradually changing as they keep using it.

Honestly, this contemplation didn't just magically wrap up in a few days. Subconsciously it spanned across several quarters, and formally, we agonized over it intensely during Q4. After making it through that daunting and confusing period of doubt, I was able to organize the breakthrough I found into a hypothesis.

Does that mean the previous hypothesis was wrong? Not at all.

Just as InBody scores have motivated countless people to work out, presenting quantification and ideals can move people, and

on the flip side, there are cases where blindly repeating a 5-minute daily workout first is what eventually shifts them into an ideal state. There is no wrong method.

It's just that we had a fresh realization that we didn't need to be fixated on the thought of, 'We must create a successful morning first! Only then can we get them to repeat it.' Both hypotheses make sense.

🍳 Let's flip the hypothesis

When we work, we often think, 'We have to do A for B to happen.'

• We have to write the proposal to convince the partner.

• We have to create a customer response manual to guide them quickly.

• We have to design an issue response process to react to bugs quickly.

But when doing A, there's bound to be a moment when you get stuck at least once. When this happens, try flipping the hypothesis.

Just as eggs cook evenly when you flip them over, it seems that accomplishing a task doesn't always require following a strictly set order. In fact, the reverse order might be faster and more effective.

Oh, you're wondering how the Morning squad is doing after changing the hypothesis?

First off, we changed our somewhat broad squad name from 'Morning' to 'Wake up,' which is the exact behavior Alarmy needs to focus on.

Since adjusting the hypothesis, we've been happily sprinting while effortlessly churning out our backlog. Both our confidence that this is the right direction and the practically projected product impact are much higher than before. We can't wait to put these changes out into the world and validate them.

Brimming with confidence

Please look forward to the results and lessons from this new hypothesis going forward. I'll share them more often through writing.

If you want to fiercely debate and agonize over hypotheses while building a service that changes the lives of 2.5 million people a day?