Quotes About Experimentation

We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential. Hence the fact that many inventions had their birth as toys.

We need to be brave enough to dissect a frog now and then, to see what's inside.

if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.

As you consider building your own minimum viable product, let this simple rule suffice: remove any feature, process, or effort that does not contribute directly to the learning you seek.

This is one of the most important lessons of the scientific method: if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.

Leadership requires creating conditions that enable employees to do the kinds of experimentation that entrepreneurship requires.

Paradoxalmente, quando a busca por perfeição é substituída pela disposição de experimentar e adaptar a ideia original, o resultado final é um produto mais perfeito.

Just as scientific experimentation is informed by theory, startup experimentation is guided by the startup's vision. The goal of every startup experiment is to discover how to build a sustainable business around that vision.

we were much more likely to run experiments on our customers than we were to cater to their whims.

achieving failure"—successfully executing a flawed plan.

It is also the right way to think about productivity in a startup: not in terms of how much stuff we are building but in terms of how much validated learning we're getting for our efforts.

Es una de las lecciones más importantes del método científico: si no puedes fracasar, no puedes aprender.

Our goal in building products is to be able to run experiments that will help us learn how to build a sustainable business.

Failure is a prerequisite to learning. The

Each employee could log in to the system at any time, choose from a list of all current and past experiments, and see a simple one-page summary of the results. Over time, those one-page summaries became the de facto standard for settling product arguments throughout the organization.

definition of a startup: a human institution designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

Compared to a lot of startups, the Grockit team had a huge advantage: they were tremendously disciplined. A disciplined team may apply the wrong methodology but can shift gears quickly once it discovers its error. Most important, a disciplined team can experiment with its own working style and draw meaningful conclusions.

Build-Measure-Learn. The fundamental activity of a startup is to turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond, and then learn whether to pivot or persevere.

This is the pattern: poor quantitative results force us to declare failure and create the motivation, context, and space for more qualitative research. These investigations produce new ideas—new hypotheses—to be tested, leading to a possible pivot. Each pivot unlocks new opportunities for further experimentation, and the cycle repeats. Each time we repeat this simple rhythm: establish the baseline, tune the engine, and make a decision to pivot or persevere.

Pivotal Labs.

Did they hire superstar entrepreneurs from outside the company? No, they assembled a team from within Intuit. Did they face constant meddling from senior management, which is the bane of innovation teams in many companies? No, their executive sponsors created an "island of freedom" where they could experiment as necessary. Did they have a huge team, a large budget, and lots of marketing dollars? Nope, they started with a team of five.

As Cook says, "Developing these experimentation systems is the responsibility of senior management; they have to be put in by the leadership. It's moving leaders from playing Caesar with their thumbs up and down on every idea to—instead—putting in the culture and the systems so that teams can move and innovate at the speed of the experimentation system.

Validated learning

Instead of making complex plans that are based on a lot of assumptions, you can make constant adjustments with a steering wheel called the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop.