Another business expertise thing that doesn’t seem talked about as much, mostly because the skill is so context specific:
Managing the tension between ‘bias for action’ and ‘wow, that was a really stupid waste of an iteration, wasn’t it?’
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I’m absolutely sure this skill exists, that people with more experience/expertise in a particular business eventually learn it, but I’m not sure how to teach it or even learn it for myself (for a particular business)
It seems most people just trial and error their way to it.
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And, yes, ‘stupid iteration’ and ‘trashing wildly’ are real failure modes, and common in earlier stage companies, mostly because ‘doing the grindy work makes us feel good about ourselves, and helps us avoid the difficult questions about our product.’
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To be clearer: the skill lies in deciding WHICH hypotheses are worth testing.
In nearly every business/product, some hypotheses are so dumb they shouldn’t be tested.
The problem is having the judgment to make that call consistently.
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What this looks like in practice: saying “well you wouldn’t know until you try, right?” to everything.
This is true, but bets have costs.
Also it probably implies that no judgment or intuition for the space exists.
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it's the experimentalist skillset.
each iteration has to prove/disprove a hypothesis and refine a working model of the world.
if you haven't set yourself up to learn something useful from the iteration, it's a waste.
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Some hypotheses are so dumb they aren’t worth testing though. That’s what I was trying to get at — reasonable people can disagree as to what to throw at the wall (to see what sticks).
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Value extraction bets have lower odds than value creation bets, because they're more likely to be based on wishful thinking about customers.
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And thinking in terms of Bottleneck slowing user value can be a good guide.
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A 1-pager including a PreMortem can be helpful.
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Maybe the best step in a PreMortem is saying "if this idea is going to fail, how can we learn that fastest"?