What is an Experiment Led Organization?
I've helped transform several organizations over the past decade or so and I’ve noticed some trends in what has worked (and what hasn’t) with regards to creating a repeatable system for experimentation.
I’m beginning to organize these thoughts into an operating model or set of principles of which I’m currently calling Experiment Led.
Below are the characteristics I’ve observed with Experiment Led organizations.
Experiment led organizations have a pipeline of ideas to test.
Having 2-3 ideas in the pipeline is not enough.
You'll be less likely to kill bad ideas if you don't think there are any more ideas left to test.
The idea pipeline is filtered through criteria from your leadership team.
Employees have incentives to bring their best ideas to test.
Experiment led organizations have cross functional teams that rapidly test ideas.
Your teams are small at first (2-3 people) and have the capabilities or access to capabilities for quickly testing desirability and viability early on.
Your teams grow as you find more evidence of traction and need to test feasibility.
Your teams are dedicated and not multitasking across many projects at once.
Experiment led organizations have a playbook of experiments.
You can't be an experiment led organization without... experiments.
However even the Testing Business Ideas library is incomplete and not tailored for your specific organization.
You modify and add to the base library to create your very own experimentation playbook.
This helps your experimentation become a repeatable process where employees leverage knowledge from each other over time.
Experiment led organizations have at least 10% or more of funding dedicated to experiments.
You can't drive people to a landing page if you have no budget for ads. You can't interview hard to access customers without compensating them for their time.
Experiments are cheaper than building the entire offering but they still cost money to run.
Your experimentation budget is protected and paired with metered funding process to proportionally invest in the ideas that have traction.
The funding is used to de-risk the opportunity and your teams are able to articulate how the money will be spent on testing the riskiest desirability, viability or feasibility assumptions.
Experiment led organizations have leaders who are open to being wrong.
You don't embrace failure, but you don't ignore it either.
Your organization's leadership team leads by example and empowers teams to critically think about their desirability, viability and feasibility risk.
It isn't a checklist you fill out and go build. You create an environment where experimentation can occur.
As I organize my thoughts on this topic of Experiment Led organizations, I’ll elaborate more on the levers you can use to help your organization create a repeatable process and culture of experimentation.
