The Product Manager's New Job Is Acceptance

A product can pass QA and scripted acceptance testing and still fail the people it was built for. This Rolebook, written for senior product managers and product leaders, argues that when software is cheap to build, the scarce job is producing evidence that the intended customer will find, use, and keep the product. It introduces Acceptance Engineering and Adversarial Acceptance Testing, which test the whole path from the promise that earns attention through setup, real use, and continued adoption. The named tools are the ICP Acceptance Specification, the Actor Map, the Acceptance Hypothesis, the Adversarial Test Card, the Rescue Ledger, the Acceptance Evidence Record, the Acceptance Decision Log, and a ten-step acceptance loop. It says what evidence would show the book is wrong, and it gives you a first test to run on Monday. The online companion at intellectualfrontiers.com carries the templates.