Like most of you know my mentor Dima gives me home assignments after our talking sessions. They are usually connected to the topics that we discussed during the meeting. We met in Friday in Helsinki and this time the home assignment was as follows:
As to the homework:
Please design and write out 10 experiments that you will be doing in the next month and a half (by end of December). One caveat: three of those - need to be about your personal work / life.
So what do we mean by experimenting?
Wikipedia about the term Experiment
An experiment is a procedure carried out to support, refute, or validate a hypothesis. Experiments provide insight into cause-and-effect by demonstrating what outcome occurs when a particular factor is manipulated. Experiments vary greatly in goal and scale, but always rely on repeatable procedure and logical analysis of the results. There also exists natural experimental studies.
As a company, our aim with these experiments is to find out possible ways that help us closer to the goal of making more people more active and benefit their health. Basically that more people would find suitable services from the Network of SportID service providers and would continue using them.
So when we put those things together, how we plan an experiment.
- We create a plan what are the actions that we take. What are the variables and what is the aim of the experiment? It would be best if we at least make some prognosis of how it will go.
- We will notify the team about it before we run it, especially in case there might be some customers contacting our customer support or sales team.
- We run the experiment
- We analyze the results and decide if it went as we expected or do we need to make a re-run with some changes.
My first experiment is this. I want all team leads to run an experiment.
Experiment no. 1
All team leads will create an experiment for the coming week on their team and run it and report the results next week. The aim and expected result of this experiment is for everyone to come to the same page about experimenting and create a culture of bold experimenting in the team. The result of this experiment is the number of experiments that we run this week. A good result would be if I could get at least half of my homework done with this experiment and the overall feedback from the team is positive.
In case you are not sure what could be your first trial, I am willing to brainstorm quickly with you. Just let me know and we will figure something out. It does not have to be a very big thing that takes all of your week, in fact, it even cannot be, since we all have our jobs to do and tasks to carry out.
The direction where to think maybe something like this - can we get more things done/sold if we try this technique/solution/approach.
If the experiment needs more time than one week, do not worry. Just set it up and get going and let the team know what are your plans.
Happy experimenting.