Beyond Test & Learn
Test & Learn is a good example of how things can look very different if you start seeing it from a customer perspective.
First, test & learn is about optimization. It is a way for us to run our experiments, test our hypotheses, get feedback and learn from those experiments in order to improve our experiences our services and our products.
But that is test & learn purely from a functional perspective. Test & Learn is much more…
Second: Test & Learn is the only way the organization is able to continuously, in real-time and at scale listen to it’s customers. Feel their reactions, enthusiasms, understand what is valuable to them, what their habits are and how they themselves measure value. Test & learn is not only about optimizing our own real estate. It’s about bringing us into the life and world view of the customer.
Third: With this comes a mindset change from confidence to curiosity. In a truly adopted test & learn team we know that our job is not to produce confident answers, but to inspire curiosity in order to come up with interesting questions. In the words of Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google; “we run our company on questions”. Questions that confirms or surprises, that widens our perspective or brings us deeper into the customer’s world.
Test & learn never stops, we are operating in continuous experimentation. Which means we don’t have to over invest in our own confidence and commit ourself to one answer. We are always looking for answers. Continuously testing assumptions, being surprised by new insights and ideas. Test & learn brings us from a culture of confidence to one of curiosity.
Fourth: When we are able to listen to the customer, poke them and watch their reaction we are building a direct line of sight between us and our customers. We can see how our efforts are having a direct and valuable effect. This makes our work more meaningful, it creates enthusiasm and a sense of value and contribution in the team.
Fifth: Test & learn helps us focus. By engaging the teams in the customer we increase our understanding of what is valuable to the customer and see that what is valuable to us might not be valuable to them, or the other way around.
Investing in efforts that are not valuable to both parties is highly inefficient. No matter how efficiently the operation of production was performed. And so maximization of efficiency comes through knowing and focus. Knowing what value exchange between the organization and the customer would offer the joint highest value return and focusing on this.
