Small Experiments Lead to Big Wins

Your feature experiments are too large, and your progress slowing down because of it.

If you’ve ever been involved in product development you almost certainly have been part of building out a large feature before it ever sees the light of day. Maybe you spent 2 months, 3 months, even 6 months building this thing that you and the team just know is going to be a hit. You launch it, everything is great, and everyone is so happy to finally deliver such an amazing feature.

Then you review the metrics.

What do you mean engagement is down 10%? I don’t understand how this great new feature is causing conversion to completely tank. Even revenue is down??

Your next steps are probably to pause the experiment and start brainstorming ways to improve things. You make a few tweaks, turn it back on, and the numbers are better, but still not great. Rinse & repeat until you finally get back to at least having no negative impact.

By that point you’ve spent countless cycles trying to make this large feature work, not wanting to waste the effort everyone put into the first version, when maybe there was an easier way. It’s one of the most common problems I’ve seen in my career, and it’s difficult to manage because we all have big dreams about making things better. We take our lofty ideas, sell our coworkers on them, and get everyone excited by how big of an opportunity we have to make significant change.

Maybe all it takes is changing some copy, or repositioning something. Maybe the key to increasing conversion is as easy as increasing the size of a button. If you just take a step back, look at the problem you’re trying to solve, then brainstorm the smallest things you could do to try and solve that problem you’ll be surprised by how quickly you can improve your metrics.