PlaybooksJune 9, 2026By Avidan Nadav

The Kill Test: Spend Ten Minutes Trying to Kill Your Own Feature.

Four counter-evidence checks to run before any roadmap pitch. If the idea survives, you walk into the review bulletproof. If it dies, it cost you ten minutes instead of a quarter.

Table of contents

Before your next roadmap pitch, spend ten minutes trying to kill the thing you're about to propose.

Not stress-test it. Kill it. Four checks, in order, and you take whichever verdict comes back. Here's the protocol.

Why your brain won't do this on its own

You've spent two weeks with this idea. Every quote you've collected supports it, because supporting quotes are the only kind you searched for. "Find me evidence for X" is the most common research query in product, and it's not research. It's shopping.

The model that helped draft your PRD can't help either. It produced the claims; it is structurally the last thing that will tell you they're unsupported. Disconfirmation has to be a deliberate act, with deliberate questions. These four.

Check 1: The reversal

Search for the opposite of your claim.

Your pitch says customers want a simpler dashboard. Go look for customers asking for more: more density, more controls, more columns. Not whether they exist (someone always does) but how they compare. If "simpler" has 4 voices and "more powerful" has 11, your feature isn't a simplification. It's a redesign for the wrong cohort.

The reversal takes two minutes and kills more bad pitches than the other three checks combined, because nobody has ever run it on their own idea voluntarily.

Check 2: The unprompted count

How many accounts raised this without being asked, in the last 90 days?

Not "how many agreed when I asked." Agreement is free; customers are polite. The number that matters is how many brought it up on their own, in a sales demo, a renewal call, a support thread, with no PM leading the witness.

If the unprompted count is approximately zero, you are looking at a manufactured need: an idea that lives in interviews and dies in the wild. Park it. If it's high and recent, keep going.

Check 3: The concentration check

Who exactly is asking?

Twelve mentions sounds like a pattern. Twelve mentions from one large, loud account is one customer with good follow-up skills. Spread the count across unique accounts, then look at the segments. Evidence concentrated in a single account is a feature request. Evidence concentrated outside your target segment is a distraction wearing a pattern's clothes.

The question to answer before moving on: would I still build this if that one account churned tomorrow?

Check 4: The workaround check

What are they doing about it today?

Real pain leaves marks. Spreadsheets, Zapier chains, an intern who does it manually every Friday, a competitor's tool wedged into the gap. If customers have built workarounds, the pain is funded and the feature has a displacement path.

If nobody has built anything, one of two things is true: the problem is impossible to work around (great, you've found a wedge) or it doesn't hurt enough to bother (you've found a nice-to-have). The follow-up calls that distinguish those two are the most valuable interviews you'll run this quarter.

The verdict

  • Survives all four: walk into the review with the counts attached. You're not defending an idea anymore; you're presenting a claim with receipts.
  • Dies on 1 or 2: you just saved a quarter of engineering for the price of ten minutes. Say so in the review. Killing your own idea in public buys more credibility than shipping a mediocre one.
  • Dies on 3 or 4: the idea isn't dead, it's misaddressed. Re-segment it or re-scope it and run the test again.

The Kill Test works on paper with any searchable archive of customer conversations. It works in minutes when the archive is already structured. Either way, the principle holds: a finding you didn't try to kill is an opinion with citations.


We built Fragment's research agent to run this by default: ask it a thorough question and the counter-evidence comes back attached, whether you wanted it or not.