Casey Carey: How to learn from mistakes

Director of marketing Analytics Casey Carey offers to celebrate your failures, share them and make a quarterly report about problems.

 

It's an old saying: "success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan". What if we flip this idea and will start to not just recognize our missteps, but let us celebrate them and to share what we have learned because of them?





Quarterly error report is a useful tool for leaders who are trying to instill a culture of growth. This report highlights the results of the largest, most failed experiments conducted in recent years, and the lessons learnt from them.

Quarterly report on failures has two objectives.

  • First, to share the findings. Failure is a normal element of life in business. The use of these mistakes in everyday work contributes to the development of collective memory and reduces the chances of a repeat problem. Failures do not have to be huge — we can talk only about testing the new buttons, but maybe on a larger scale new features.
 

  • The second objective is to rapidly enhance a culture of mistakes and learning. Failure is a by-product of good testing. "The share the success of our tests is about 10%, says Jesse Nichols, head of web applications and Analytics in the Nest. But we learn something in all our experiments."
 

Sharing successful experiments, highlighting the mistakes and lessons learned, you make life easier. The easier it is to digest information, the more likely it is that people learn something from it. "Present the entire test on a single slide: description, hypotheses, variations, conclusion and next steps," says Jessie.





If the experiment went wrong, it does not mean that someone made a mistake. In culture growth it means that you tried something new, assess the results and saw that the changes did not benefit. If your experiments always succeed, you will likely see them often enough, or not aggressive enough.

However, it is important that failures were carefully evaluated. Before you start preparing the quarterly report the error, make sure that everyone in the company understand the growth mechanism through testing and experimentation. You should have a clear, repeatable tools and methodologies for testing, which can (and should) follow.

"You must be very good to build experiments to achieve two things: growth and ideas, — says the founder and CEO of digital Agency WiderFunnel Chris Howard. — If you look at the program of optimization as a strategic method of studying your current and potential customers, helping them to understand their way of thinking, you will see a picture much wider and will be able to find the benefit in every experience."

No one knows until you try. This is one of the truths of the digital world, and that's a good reason to test everything. When you look at the step forward and begin to celebrate their failures, in the end, everyone will win. published

 

P. S. And remember, only by changing their consumption — together we change the world! ©

Source: ideanomics.ru/articles/8297