A validation campaign is a proposal for how to achieve or get closer to your cycle objectives (traction goal) within 90 days.
A single validation campaign may not be enough to get you to your goal, which is why you often need to run multiple campaigns in parallel or stacked one after another during a 90-day cycle.
A validation campaign is further broken into a series of 2 week sprints. A 90-day validation campaign has 6 sprints. Validation campaigns don’t have to use all 90-days.
A good validation campaign is balanced on Discovery-Insights-Experiments-Traction.
The right balance will depend on your problem evidence strength or prior insights:
A lot of business model innovation comes from a remixing of existing patterns across diverse domains. Analogs are strategies and tactics that have worked for others that may also work for you.
Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, is known to have traveled great distances to study his competitors. He brought back many new ideas, like the modern-day centralized supermarket checkout lane, and through a series of experiments in a few stores, would find and double-down on the best ideas.
You traction goals constrain your campaigns. The campaign(s) you use to sign up a thousand $10/mo b2c customers will be very different from the campaign(s) you use to sign up ten b2b customers paying you $1,000/mo.
Your strategy should inform your tactics versus the other way around.
A strategy, when successful, gets you closer to your goal and is often long-lived past the 90-day cycle. Subsequent validation campaigns typically double-down on previous strategies that worked.
You only need a handful of working strategies to find product/market fit.