Getting Started with Upperstory in 10 Minutes

Start running experiments as a team

Upperstory is for discovery powered teams to learn as fast as possible about what makes their work valuable.

Upperstory — an app for discovery powered teams

Main Activity

Upperstory is an app for your team to collaborate on discovering a new business/campaign/product that customers love. Unlike task management apps which focus on being busy and getting lot’s of tasks done, Upperstory is focused on learning by testing our assumptions. The main flow is:

1. Establish a GOAL that the business needs to reach.
2. Create a backlog of EXPERIMENTS to test that we are making progress towards and ultimately achieving the goal.
3. Run the experiments and make NOTES on our observations.
4. Extract an insight that the team can learn from and build upon.

Goals

All activity is structured around GOALS. Teams identify goals that they need to accomplish in order to be successful. A GOAL is something we want to learn like “Identify our first target customer” rather than something we get done like “Release first version of the website”.

Experiments

A GOAL contains EXPERIMENTS. Experiments are how we test certain assumptions which need to be correct for our work to be valuable. The main elements of an EXPERIMENT are:

• HYPOTHESIS: A statement of fact that we need to be true about our business. e.g. “Our first customer is an inner city school teacher” or “A red button will convert better than a blue button”
• TEST: A description of the activity that will test the hypothesis, including how it will be measured. e.g. “Create two versions of the homepage. One with a blue button and one with a red button. Use Experiments in Google Analytics to test best conversion.”
• EXPECTED OUTCOME: What we hope to see when in the metrics if our hypothesis is correct. “We expect Blue to perform better by more than 20%”

Get Setup

First we need to layout the goals that we want to focus on. I’ll walk you through an example for a new startup.

Click on the ‘+’ icon to describe your goal.

Remember — a great goal is something you LEARN not something you GET DONE.

Click into the goal and start adding experiments. Click on the flask to add a new experiment.

A great hypothesis is a statement of fact that we will test if true.

Add any notes to the ‘Discovery’ section.

Capture what is important in discovery notes.

Now invite your team to collaborate on the experiment

Click Invite Team Members in the top right.

As you run the experiment, add insights to discovery notes.

Capture realtime discovery notes collaboratively.

Decide whether the hypothesis was valid or not. We have set this one as Invalidated.

An invalidated hypothesis.

Upperstory is still in free beta. We’d love to hear how you go. Leave us a comment with any feedback. I’ll post more tips here so follow me for more.