From Feedback to Fast Adoption - Why Product Testing Builds Trust
Why Confidence in the Real Currency of Innovation
Before I ever held the title of strategist or consultant, I spent over a year doing something a little different: listening. I was traveling from practice to practice, sitting beside veterinary teams, observing how they navigated their day, where the bottlenecks were, what frustrated them most. My mission? To help evolve a PACS system into something more than just software, into a tool that made their lives easier. We weren’t gathering feedback for feedback’s sake. We were co-building a solution that mirrored their workflows, not ours. And what I learned in that process has stuck with me ever since: Real traction starts not at launch, but in the trenches of early product testing, with real users at the center. Too often, product development gets siloed. Features are designed in meeting rooms. Messaging is crafted before the first user ever logs in. And “go-to-market” becomes synonymous with “cross-your-fingers-and-hope-the-market-likes-it.” But there’s a smarter, more strategic way. When you design your alpha, beta, and pilot phases not just as QA steps but as confidence-building milestones, you do something powerful:
You build trust with your users, because they see their feedback shaping the product.
You build momentum, because you have real stories, use cases, and proof points before you ever “launch.”
You build a better product, because your assumptions are replaced by insights. This isn’t about perfection. It’s about progress, guided by the people who matter most: your customers.
Beyond the Blueprint: Featuring David Dieffenbach
In every edition of Thavma Insights, we feature voices who turn insight into action and who’ve lived the messiness behind strategy that actually works.
This week, I’m thrilled to welcome David Dieffenbach to the conversation. David isn’t just a product strategy and development expert he’s someone I’ve had the privilege of building and launching software with. We’ve been in the trenches together, navigating shifting requirements, feedback loops, and the pressure to make the right call before launch day.
David Dieffenbach brings the kind of product thinking that earns trust across teams and with customers. He knows that great products don’t emerge fully formed from a whiteboard. They’re built alongside users, refined through testing, and launched with purpose.
From alpha testing that fuels discovery to pilots that drive proof, David’s approach is a masterclass in how to use product development as a strategic engine for early adoption and long-term growth. If you’ve ever asked yourself, “How do I know this is the right thing to build?”, this is the perspective you need.
“Testing ideas with customers is both intimidating and exciting- if you’ve been collaborating with them as you take ideas into design and then development, it’s often more the latter. In fact, if you AREN’T collaborating with customers to help identify their needs and get feedback on designed solutions, you deserve to be a bit intimidated as it could be the first time you are socializing your idea..what if they hate it?
You don’t always need Alpha, Beta and PIlot programs for everything you do, but it’s always worth asking yourself if one of a couple of those would help ensure success.
ALPHA: My favorite experiences with early testing are Alpha pilots where there is some simulation of the end product prior to heavy investment in a full system. For instance, in one alpha test, the product we sent customers wasn’t in the final packaging, and the results were manually typed into a prototype design, as we had a lot of moving parts to assess. Because the small group of customers were aware of the Alpha goals, they were excellent at providing us input on multiple aspects as well as reacting quickly to new ideas that came from the pilot. As stated in the newsletter, Alpha is much more about discovery and refinement than validation. Another benefit of Alpha testing is internal buy in. Shaping a company to embrace new ideas that require investment can be tricky, and an Alpha test like the example above not only helps refine the product but also gives talking points and some early data to share with decision makers to influence that investment story.
BETA: When I was Product Manager for a leading PIMS product, we were releasing 4 times a year which probably sounds ridiculously slow to a modern SaaS Product Manager. However, this legacy server-based system taught me the value of Beta that I think a lot of modern software forgets. Too often, I see people releasing features to customers with little to no documentation and hoping for user feedback to help them improve. This type of release can work, but there is real risk that you are breaking workflows or not providing enough training material without a Beta. An excellent thing about Beta testing is you often build relationships with key customers-it takes a special type of customer to make time to help you prove out your software. These customers, in my experience, ultimately grow to want to see the beta features working and will provide frank and honest feedback not only on the features you are testing but on just about anything in the software. Tip: Incentivize your beta testers. They are taking time to test something, but being an early adopter is not payment in itself. Even if it’s a small gesture like a gift card, it goes a long way to building relationships and ensuring you are acknowledging the time they’ve taken.
PILOT: Pilot testing is a dress rehearsal for opening night- you’ve perhaps done an alpha and hopefully done a beta test, and now you want to sell tickets to an audience by selling a feature to new users. Or to use a food analogy, when a new restaurant opens, often the chefs will host private events for friends and family long before they hang out the ‘open’ sign to practice their workflows, and even then the ‘grand opening’ won’t happen the day that ‘Open’ sign comes up. As the Thavma Insights newsletter mentions, this dress rehearsal also brings in other members of the team to test sales tools, pricing, and support the ultimate launch. In some of my pilots, this even means bringing in teams outside the organization as features involve integrations with other company’s products.”
From Alpha to Pilot: The Strategic Role of Testing Phases
Alpha Testing: Pressure-Testing Your Assumptions
What it is: Alpha testing is early-stage, internal or limited customer testing designed to pressure-test your assumptions. It’s not about polish—it’s about honesty. You’re putting core functionality in front of power users or design partners to uncover what works, what breaks, and what’s misaligned with real-world workflows.
Why it matters: Alpha is where you learn whether your foundational assumptions hold up. It reveals not only bugs, but gaps in logic, workflow misalignment, and misfires in product-market fit.
Strategic Insight: Alpha isn’t about validation, it’s about discovery. When you treat it as a tool for surfacing strategic insights (not just technical feedback), you ensure your roadmap is grounded, not internal bias.
Action Step: Pressure-Test Your Assumptions with a Stripped-Down Alpha. List your top 3 assumptions about how your product will be used—then design a simple, unfinished version that tests them directly. Skip the polish. Simulate key workflows using mockups or manual inputs. The goal isn’t to impress—it’s to break things early and learn what actually matters. Tip from David Dieffenbach: “Don’t wait for perfect packaging. Create a stripped-down version that’s just good enough to spark feedback.”
Beta Testing: Building Confidence Through Real-World Use
What it is: Beta testing is a controlled rollout to a broader group of users. The product is functional but still evolving, and this phase gives you your first look at how users engage when you’re not in the room, surfacing usability gaps, onboarding friction, and real-world behavior.
Why it matters: Beta reveals usability challenges, onboarding friction, and feature clarity issues. It also begins to shape the user narrative; what customers are telling others about your product.
Strategic Insight: This phase is about confidence-building, for both your internal team and your customers. The goal isn’t just to fix issues, but to understand how users think, feel, and talk about your product.
Action Step: Test Clarity First, Then Collect Strategic Feedback. Before releasing to beta, write the email you’d send to a confused user. If you can’t explain the feature simply, you’re not ready. Once it’s clear, share it with 3 trusted customers. Ask them:
What’s missing?
What would make this easier to adopt?
Then run your beta with a structured scorecard to gather consistent, actionable insights:
What task took longer than expected?
What felt confusing?
What surprised you (good or bad)?
Where did onboarding friction show up (shipping, install, setup, time to go live)?
Pro move: Reward your testers. Even a $20 gift card builds goodwill and better feedback.
Pilot Programs: Turning Use Into Proof
What it is: Pilot testing is a targeted, time-bound implementation with real users and clear success criteria. It’s a mini launch designed to validate not just the product, but your business model, pricing, and support infrastructure, while capturing reference accounts and proof points for scale.
Why it matters: Pilots give you tangible success stories, reference accounts, and onboarding reps. They surface not just product issues, but organizational ones: How does customer success respond? What support resources are missing? How fast can value be delivered?
Strategic Insight: A well-run pilot is both a testing lab and a marketing engine. It gives you stories, quotes, and results you can use to build credibility and drive early adoption.
Action Step: Treat Your Pilot Like a Dress Rehearsal. Before launching a pilot, define three essentials:
What will success look like for the customer?
What will success look like for your team?
How will you capture and communicate that story afterward?
Pilots aren’t just about proving what works, they’re about revealing why it matters. As David Dieffenbach puts it, a pilot is your dress rehearsal for opening night. And just like in theatre, what you learn here shapes everything: your sales scripts, your pricing confidence, and your internal readiness to scale.
Turning Feedback into a Flywheel
How Strategic Testing Fuels Better Products and Faster Adoption
When testing is done right, it's not just a gate between product and launch. It becomes a flywheel, one that spins faster with each round of customer input, refinement, and delivery.
The goal? Create a virtuous cycle where your users aren’t just giving feedback, they’re shaping your product, validating your decisions, and becoming your early advocates. Let’s unpack how this works.
The Customer-Driven Flywheel
Each testing phase feeds into the next, not in a linear “one-and-done” sense, but as part of a continuous learning loop:
Customer Feedback: Alpha and beta testing surface not just what’s broken, but what’s unclear, underused, or unexpectedly delightful.
Product Refinement: Insights from the field guide everything from UX tweaks to roadmap reprioritization. Development becomes grounded in real-world use, not assumptions.
User Confidence: As customers see their input translated into improvements, trust grows. They feel heard and that creates stickiness.
Advocacy: Testers become your first testimonials. Your “voice of the customer” isn't hypothetical, it's ready to go live.
Early Adoption: Pilots prove product-market fit and give you tangible proof points — often before your public launch even hits.
This is how you turn iterative testing into real-world momentum.
From Feature Requests to Strategic Direction
One of the biggest mindset shifts in a Strategy First approach is this: Not all feedback is created equal. The value is in what you do with it.
Prioritize based on workflow alignment, repeatability, and onboarding impact. Turn insights into actionable roadmap shifts and refined messaging. That means creating systems for prioritizing based on:
Workflow alignment — does this fix a pain point your ideal customers actually have?
Repeatability — is this issue coming up in multiple accounts?
Impact on onboarding/adoption — will this change reduce friction and increase satisfaction?
When your testing process filters and amplifies the right signals, your product roadmap becomes sharper, and your positioning becomes stronger.
Action Step: Build a Lightweight Feedback Engine. Don’t rely on ad hoc emails or gut feelings. Create a structured system that turns customer feedback into action and alignment:
Set up a shared doc or form to collect input from testers
Schedule regular synthesis sessions with product and go-to-market teams
Assign a “feedback synthesizer” to distill the top 3 insights after each phase: → What did we learn? → What changed as a result? → What still needs attention?
Make it visible. Drop one quote or insight from a tester into Slack (or system you are using) every Friday. This keeps the customer voice front and center and turns feedback into forward motion. The most effective startups aren’t just agile they’re aligned with the customer from day one.
Turning Testers into Evangelists
Early users are not just testers, they are collaborators, validators, and case study sources. Involve them as partners to turn product experience into advocacy.
How Customer Experience Becomes Your Greatest Trust Signal
If there’s one thing, I’ve seen time and again, it’s this:
Your best marketing doesn’t come from your team, it comes from your customers.
When someone sees a peer using your product, vouching for it, and speaking to the real value it brings to their workflow, you shortcut the sales cycle. You move from “sounds interesting” to “we need this.”
That’s the magic of early testing when it’s done right, it doesn’t just shape a better product; it seeds your early trust network.
Your Testers Are More Than QA — They’re Your First Launch Partners
Let’s reframe the roles:
Alpha testers = Product collaborators
Beta users = Experience validators
Pilot customers = Case study gold
When you involve users early and often and treat them like partners, not guinea pigs, you open the door to long-term loyalty. People naturally evangelize the products they helped shape.
And that’s not just warm-and-fuzzy sentiment. It’s strategic leverage.
Action Step: Build a Post-Test Evangelism Plan
Before your testing phase wraps, have a plan in place to capture, amplify, and sustain the stories coming out of it:
Capture Testimonials While the Value is Fresh. Don’t wait for a formal case study request. Right after a key win or “aha” moment, ask a simple question: “Would you be open to sharing a quick quote about how that impacted your workflow?”
Turn results into marketing stories. Create a founding customer program that sustains long-term trust.
Turn Success into Stories. Package their results into formats you can use: Micro case studies for your website Quotes for your sales deck A “real-world results” slide for investor pitches,
Create a Founding Customer Program. Invite pilot testers to be part of an exclusive group: early access, feedback previews, a voice in the roadmap. This builds long-term engagement and positions them as internal champions.
Trust, Borrowed and Earned
In markets like veterinary tech, trust doesn’t start with your product, it starts with your customers. Prospects want to know:
Who’s using it?
How did it fit into their day?
Did it actually solve the problem?
Turn your best testers into your first case studies. After a successful test, ask: “What surprised you most about this experience?” Package that answer into a testimonial or slide and get their OK to use it publicly.
Bonus: Invite them into a Founding Customer Group. Early access, roadmap previews, VIP treatment. Loyalty earned.
When your earliest users can answer those questions, you’re not just promoting a solution, you’re proving it.
This is how you move from “just another vendor” to a trusted partner.
Why Testing Isn’t a Phase — It’s a Trust-Building Strategy
Testing is not a technical checkbox, it’s a go-to-market lever. Use it to align with how customers think, decide, and adopt. When you view alpha, beta, and pilot testing as strategic tools rather than technical hurdles, everything changes. You move from “testing for bugs” to testing for belief in your product, your team, and your ability to deliver real results.
This is exactly where the Strategy First approach comes in. It’s not about throwing tactics at the wall. It’s about aligning every move, from development to launch, around how your customers think, decide, and adopt.
How Testing Supports Your Strategic Foundations
Testing aligns with the Marketing Hourglass™ and helps you refine positioning based on real customer feedback.
Marketing Hourglass™ Alignment:
Know + Like: Engaging early testers builds authentic awareness and affinity.
Trust: Nothing earns it faster than letting customers shape the product.
Try + Buy: Pilots let prospects experience real value before they commit.
Repeat + Refer: Evangelists born from early wins become your referral engine.
Customer Journey Mapping:
Testing exposes friction across onboarding, education, and support, before those issues stall growth.
You can identify and fix gaps in messaging, training, and activation, using real-world insights, not guesswork.
Positioning & Messaging:
Early feedback clarifies what users actually value (often different from what you assumed).
You gain the language your market is already using, not the language you're trying to force.
Action Step: Embed Testing Into Your Go-to-Market Strategy. Make testing a formal part of your GTM plan. Capture insights, build assets, and validate messaging before you scale. Here’s how to apply this right now:
Make testing a line item in your go-to-market plan — not just a development phase.
Define success metrics for each stage (alpha/beta/pilot) that include both product and trust-building goals.
Build your marketing assets as you test — testimonials, objections, positioning, and case studies can start well before your official launch.
Download the Thavma Product Testing Trust Toolkit — a practical worksheet to help your team apply these principles across every stage of testing.
Trust is Earned in the Process
Early customer involvement isn’t just a way to make better products, it’s how you show up differently in the market. It’s how you prove you’re not just another vendor, but a strategic partner who listens, learns, and leads.
When you build with your customers, you don’t need to convince them to adopt. They’re already on board.
Ready to sharpen your strategy? Start here!
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