What is a smoke test in product development?
A smoke test is a minimal-effort validation experiment used to test whether a product idea has demand before any real engineering investment. Classic smoke tests include landing pages with a ‘Buy’ button, Facebook ads to gauge click-through, fake doors and concierge MVPs that simulate the product manually.
Smoke tests deliver fast, cheap signal. They are most valuable in the earliest validation stage and become decreasingly informative as products mature. Combining smoke-test data with customer interviews triangulates demand more reliably than either alone.