Laura Schaffer: prediction

Transcript context

…Hopefully. Cool. So maybe if you're watching us on YouTube, leave a comment and if you want Laura to write in depth about this idea and spread it to your company. Okay, I want to talk about growth, but I have one last question just along the lines of experimentation. Is there any other just, I don't know, big lessons or takeaways of running experiments that would be interesting to share? I think we got into this one a little bit, but I just really want to exclamation point, underline it, which is that notion of making the data wrap to fit a concept. I think a lot of teams feel and are under a lot of pressure to show progress and, "What did you do this month? Where did the metrics move?" And it can cause folks to feel like they have to do that, where it's like, "Oh gosh, this experiment." Everyone's got the experience where you run an experiment and you're like looking at the data, refresh, refresh, refresh, oh my gosh, and actually perform worse. Or it's not the same and, "Gosh, we got everyone really excited about this thing that we all worked on really hard. Like, oh my god, what are we going to say in the QBR or the monthly report?" Whatever it is that the results come to light. And to this, I'd say this, that it's incredibly important for growth teams to educate out and for folks outside of growth and leading growth, especially to understand that the best way for a growth team to succeed, the only way really for them to succeed is to embrace the fact that they're there to validate, to understand what the biggest opportunities are and to go after them. And that is not something that can be done on a weekly timeline, sometimes even a monthly, depending on the space you're in and what's known and unknown. And so any growth team that's beholden to short timeline wins and improvement is always going to be dangerous. That's an environment that's conducive to vanity Metric usage and massaging the data [inaudible 00:51:47]. And ones that are more successful are ones that are reporting over longer periods of time. Because I think growth team, given enough time to fail, enough time to learn the right thing to do is absolutely going to show success, real success. Not that, "Okay, we're going to make this data fit." But real moving the metrics success. And so definitely educating out. If you find yourself in a position where you are beholden to that, share that 80% fail rate. Just math, statistics, data. You cannot be successful in an environment, but over time you can be. And so that's one thing I definitely would draw on. I end up spending a decent amount of my pie chart at Twilio and then also at Rapid where I was after that and I'm sure I'll spend some time at Amplitude as well. Just helping folks understand what is the healthiest ecosystem, most powerful ecosystem for a growth team to operate in. And time and expectations over time is a big part of that. When you say pie chart, it's like the pie chart of your time like a big chunk of your time goes to this?…

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