Fail fast and Fail often

The trick behind successful ideas is to always continue iterating.  The problem is that when we feel our idea is ready, we go out to the world and we tested in the entire market. 

What generally happens is that you end up with not a ton of engagement and you might think the idea is a failure.  

So, instead of finding out if it works with your entire market,  you need to TEST and learn before you IMPLEMENT. 

This will enable you to observe how a group of users  interact with the idea in its current state, and ask for feedback on how the experience feels so it can get better. 

It's all about putting the user first. By gathering first-hand user feedback, you can make informed  decisions and improve user satisfaction in the long run. 

Take Google for example. Test and iterate is part of our 8 pillars of innovation.  The first version of Google ads, released in 1999, wasn’t very successful – almost no one clicked on the ads. Not many people remember that because we kept iterating and eventually reached the model we have today. And we’re still improving it; every year we run tens of thousands of search and ads quality experiments, and over the past year we’ve launched over a dozen new formats. Some products we update every day. 

So next time you are ready to launch, make sure you have tested your idea first with a set of users. And remember this is a process that the more you repeat the better your idea gets!

See you next time!