A 100% learning rate

‘Win or learn’ is a common phrase in growth.

But it’s harmful.

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‘Win or Learn’ implies that learning is an optional, alternative outcome to winning.

Something mutually exclusive from winning.

Take winning out.

Take failing out.

• Do something.

• Learn.

• Apply your learnings going forward.

Learnings are everywhere - not just in the failed experiments.

‘Execute and learn’ is a much better description of the ideal way of working.

When an experiment fails, teams often seek to dig deep to understand why and figure out where to go next.

Yet you rarely see the same with experiment wins.

You should look for opportunities to learn even when an experiment plays out just how you hypothesised.

Usually, when ‘winning’, the common reaction is just to move on to what may at the time seem obvious as the next iteration.

But this is the perfect time to dig deeper and learn more.

• Have you established causal relationships?

• What happened to secondary metrics, and why?

• If you dig deeper into experiment cohorts what behavioural differences do we see?

• Are there other surfaces where what you learnt here could be applied?

• What other teams might benefit from what you learnt?

• …

Win and learn.

Fail and learn.

Execute and learn.

Emphasise learning.

So the next time an experiment creates conclusive positive impact, don’t uncork the champagne just yet.

Take the time to analyse and hypothesise about why the variant won.

Can you prove that?

Would it be useful to prove that?

What else could you learn from the experiment?

Ask yourselves where else these learnings might be leveraged, and socialise them.

Avoid blind success by seeking to learn why you won as voraciously as you seek to learn why you failed.

It's key to learning faster.

And set these expectations with the teams, and with leadership.

When it comes to product and growth, the culture of winning at all costs is ironically not at all conducive to winning repeatably. 🤔

Repeatability.

Predictability.

These things come from consistent learning.

So aim for a 100% learning rate.

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Thanks again to our sponsor for this post - Paragon!

Until next time!