Brainstorm Experiments New

What Is This?

Brainstorm Experiments New is a skill designed to help product managers, founders, and designers create lean startup experiments for new product ideas. It generates structured XYZ hypotheses and recommends low-effort validation methods such as landing pages, explainer videos, and pre-order campaigns. The skill draws from pretotyping methodology, which focuses on validating whether you are building the right product before investing significant time and resources into building it correctly.

The core output of this skill is a set of testable assumptions paired with concrete experiment designs that can be executed quickly and cheaply. Rather than spending months on development, you get a roadmap for learning whether real demand exists for your idea.

Why Use It?

Most product failures happen not because of poor execution but because teams build something nobody actually wants. The traditional approach of writing a business plan, building a product, and then launching it is expensive and slow. By the time you discover a fundamental flaw in your assumptions, you have already spent a significant budget and months of effort.

This skill addresses that problem directly. It applies lean startup thinking to generate experiments that can be run in days or weeks rather than months. Each experiment is designed to test a specific assumption with minimal investment, giving you real data from real people before you commit to full development.

The XYZ hypothesis format forces clarity. Instead of vague assumptions like "people will like this product," you get structured statements such as "At least 20% of small business owners who visit our landing page will sign up for early access within the first two weeks." That specificity makes it possible to actually measure whether your hypothesis is true or false.

How to Use It?

To use this skill, you provide a description of your new product idea. The skill then generates a set of XYZ hypotheses and maps each one to a suitable validation method.

A basic prompt might look like this:

Product idea: A subscription service that delivers curated office 
supplies to remote workers monthly.

Target customer: Freelancers and remote employees aged 25-40.

Core assumption: Remote workers will pay $30/month for curated 
office supply bundles.

The skill will return structured output similar to this:

Hypothesis 1 (XYZ Format):
X: At least 15% of remote workers
Y: who see a targeted Facebook ad for our subscription box
Z: will click through to a landing page and enter their email 
   within 30 days.

Suggested Experiment: Build a simple landing page with a 
waitlist signup. Run a $200 Facebook ad campaign targeting 
remote work communities. Measure click-through rate and 
email capture rate.

Effort Level: Low (3-5 days to set up)
Success Threshold: 15% conversion on ad clicks to email signup

You can run this process for multiple assumptions, generating a prioritized list of experiments ranked by risk level and effort required. Start with the riskiest assumptions first, since those are the ones most likely to invalidate your entire concept.

When to Use It?

This skill is most valuable at the earliest stages of product development, specifically before you have written a single line of production code or hired a development team. Use it when you have a product idea but are not yet certain there is genuine market demand.

It is also useful when you are pivoting an existing product into a new market or adding a major new feature that represents a significant departure from your current offering. Any time you are making a large bet on an unproven assumption, running a pretotype experiment first is worth the small investment of time.

Teams working within agile or lean frameworks will find this skill fits naturally into their discovery phase. It can feed directly into sprint planning by converting validated hypotheses into confirmed user stories and product requirements.

Important Notes

Pretotyping is not the same as prototyping. A pretotype is designed to test market demand, not product functionality. Keep your experiments as simple as possible. A landing page with a signup form is often sufficient to validate demand before you build anything.

Set your success thresholds before you run the experiment, not after. Defining what success looks like in advance prevents you from moving the goalposts once results come in.

Be honest about your results. A failed experiment is valuable data. It tells you to change direction before you waste resources, which is exactly the outcome lean methodology is designed to produce.