Have you ever been in a brainstorming session and someone says, “ah, that’s such a good idea!”
How do they know it’s a good idea?
“The best thing we have going for us is our intelligence, especially pattern recognition, sharpened over eons of evolution” (Neil deGrasse Tyson, 2015). Pattern recognition, according to IQ test designers, is a crucial determinant of a person’s potential to think logically, verbally, numerically, and spatially. Compared to all mental abilities, pattern recognition is said to have the highest correlation with the so-called general intelligence factor (Kurzweil, 2012). The ability to spot existing or emerging patterns is one of the most if not the most critical skill in decision-making, though we’re mostly unaware that we do it all the time (Miemis, 2010).
A person’s potential to recall and assess outcomes determines the accuracy of the good idea claim — that said, the person probably doesn’t have enough information to warrant an accurate application. Furthermore, let’s answer the question; what constitutes a good idea?
In the context of doing business, a good idea is proven to be reasonable based on the results it delivers. The data stemming from the implementation of the concept quantify, whether it is good or not.
When working towards attribution, analysts look at the outcomes and sort through questions like, “Is the company plus or minus x percent as a result of implementing the idea? If the concept proves to be minus x, then how can the experiment be optimized to ensure a positive outcome, if at all? If there isn’t a direct correlation, a 1:1 ratio of implementation to bottom-line impact, then what is the secondary effect? Can a derivative effect be attributed?
These are the outcomes that need to be assessed and the questions, among others, that need to be answered.
Create Growth Experiments & Test Ideas
Since the MVP of bnotes, the Sneakz Organic team has been using the app to build its food and beverage startup. Since 2015, the company scaled the operations to a group of 11 members and went from about 200 retailers to 4,500 nation-wide. As you can imagine, there were many variables at play throughout the process: Product formulation and recipe creation, ingredient sourcing, product design and packaging, supply-chain management, sales, customer service, and marketing.
Experiment Activation
Implementing growth experiments throughout the lifecycle of the business has been essential, and formulating a hypothesis involves a collective contribution of ideas from the team. When a team member says, “I have a good idea!” they really mean they have a hypothesis that needs to be tested. Each time the company does a test, an attribution has to be assessed to answer the questions per above.
Hypothesis — if we lower the cost threshold from a $40 Meal2Go box of 10 to a $5 Trial then we will get more people to purchase Meal2Go.
Action — Create a new note and use consistent hashtags to ensure cohesive documentation. In this case Sneakz used tags: #meal2go #klaviyo #attribution with the bold tags being the common ones among all the notes pertaining to this experiment.
