Rapid experimentation: the growth tactic that doesn’t get its due
You can do structured testing in more than just blue or green buttons.
Bear with me as I’m writing this from my phone today. There’s nothing like a good change of scenery to get the reflection juiced going. Speaking of experimenting with changes of scenery...
I’ve worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs at this point in time (which is crazy to write on paper), one of the key levers they gloss over when it comes to growth tactics is rapid experimentation (let’s shorten this to RE since it takes forever to type on mobile).
When I say RE, I don’t just mean from the product standpoint. That’s the obvious choice - the ones that thousands of hands have typed about. RE can happen in so many areas of an organization.
Side note: if you are going to pitch this to your boss and you are not an executive, this will be a tough sell. What you can use to back up your story are stories on companies and varying the areas that they used RE.
Before we go too deep into ideas and hand-to-hand combat, I want to make sure I lay the groundwork. You need to have a way to track results if you are going to start leveraging RE in your org. Knowing what things are working and what is not working is impossible if you don’t have a framework for analyzing the results. Even if the data is largely qualitative (vs. quantitative), you still need to measure it.
The second rule of RE: know what success means to you. If you just go around experimenting on everything, and you never place a floor or ceiling on the results, you won’t know what to double down on or kill off. You have to create a “success is...” statement BEFORE you start the testing. Not in the middle or it will change your perspective and you will have a tainted experiment. By not knowing anything, if you blow the estimate out of the water, you will learn how to do proper forecasting (which is a skill you need to be great at if you are trying to grow quickly).
The last rule of RE: only experiment on one thing at a time. Recently we were changing an interview process and our Director of Ops suggesting changing other aspects of the process to improve it. If you are going to use RE for growth and speed, you need to address one solution at a time. Otherwise, you will not be able to properly attribute the cause of the positive or negative movement during an experiment.
Here is just a few ideas that you can use RE with outside of technical product runs:
As I mentioned before, you can test out onboarding tricks during the hiring process to see if they increase retention and engagement. A 90-day plan is a great test.
Test if handwritten letters to your top customers each year turn into a referral generator. If so, how much time spent for the ROI? Could an intern be responsible for most of it?
Test it letting people off work at noon on Friday results in increased productivity that outweighs the lowered level of productivity in those “lost” hours.
Test if a “pod” approach would work for smaller projects where one team member from all teams works exclusively on one difficult product/service launch (we’re about to test this out at KnowCap).
Test if junior employees should be intentionally matched with an advanced mentor to help speed up their onboarding and increase their success rate at the job
There are lots of tests up and down the organization structure that you can experiment with. See what the results are after a few months and let me know what you find.