How to Run Smart Experiments When You Just Don’t Know

How all good entrepreneurs run experiments at the earliest stages of a business, and how you can use this approach for your own career.

A couple of years ago I had a Commoncog reader join me as a summer intern because she wanted to observe me doing ‘startup stuff’. The ‘project’ I was working on was to figure out a scalable way to create new cases for the Commoncog Case Library. At the end of the internship she gave me a couple of notes about the experience, and we met up for a meal to discuss those notes. At the top of her list was the following observation: “I’m surprised you didn’t have a hypothesis before you ran this!”

I was taken aback. I was then in the midst of implementing — and then publishing — a series of essays about Becoming Data Driven in Business. In the series I argued for creating hypotheses and then testing them in tightly-scoped, iterative bets. I wrote about how the Amazon Weekly Business Review was less a metrics review meeting and more a way to generate knowledge about the ‘causal model’ of a business. I also explained how the ideas of statistician and ‘business philosopher’ W. Edwards Deming (from which