You can do anything, but you can’t do everything
How to do the most valuable thing?
Richard Simms
· 4,372 views
The paralysis of continuous development, it's hard choosing the next small problem to chip away at. It should be easy, but it can lead to frustrations and feeling that your efforts are not making a dent into your metrics.
There are so many fresh opportunities and new assumptions around every corner. In the search of the next big thing to move your needle, it requires first narrowing your field of vision.
I help product teams create better experiences to capture more value. However I’ve seen to many experiments that test the solution built and delivered into production. A/B tests to confirm the whole solution against the desired outcome lack strategic thinking. This often results in experiments been completed to create and taking too long to gain any statistic significance. They also only give us limited insights into the solution. Whilst telling us nothing about why the solution was successful or not. This means a lot of work the team completed without any data to validate whether it was worth building.
I encourage teams to run quicker, cheaper experiments without building too much to test their assumptions. Break down their ideas into the underlying assumptions that needed to be true in order to make the MVP work. Once we have these assumptions, gather feedback on the desirability, feasibility and viability as defined by the opportunity, and whether it will drive the desired outcome as a result.
The value-based design process, we test assumptions, we learn more about the opportunity. We're open to the possibilities of other more effectively solutions and the behaviour of our users.
A final A/B tests in production, to confirm with confidence the solution following the shorter experiments carried out during discovery. Refine the solution by continuously researching and developing the solutions to achieve more than was perviously thought possible.
It’s important to step back from your daily tasks and measure what matters.