Step 7: Implement & Evaluate

In the last step, you brainstormed potential growth experiments and then chose the top five experiments to run with. Now it’s time to take action.

In this step we want you to run some experiments relatively quickly so you can evaluate what’s working and what isn’t. You can’t be sure which experiments are going to work, it’s just a guess, remember? So, the goal is to do some initial tests to see which experiments are worth more effort.

Running Experiments

It’s time to test your hypotheses and start running experiments! You’ll want to create a plan for execution and then track ongoing experiments so you know what you’re working on.

Try to focus your efforts on these experiments. Splitting your efforts between growth and other projects can make your experiments less likely to succeed, or, at least, take longer to complete. Additionally, be sensitive not to start more experiments than you can reasonably maintain.

You’ve already been working in the Experiment Tracker Spreadsheet (if you haven’t, please go back to step 5). This is the tool you’ll use to keep track of the results of your experiments as you go.

Now is the time to start implementing your experiments. Decide which you’ll work on right now and dive in!

Please not the Active tab of the Experiment Tracker Spreadsheet. This is where you can keep track of the experiments you’re currently running (and there’s some extra columns there we’ll show you how to use shortly).

We’re not exactly sure what’s on your list, so how long these experiments take is up to you. Hopefully you can keep your experiments short and iterative so we can move on to evaluating these experiments soon.

Evaluate which experiments worked

Once you’ve run your five experiments, you’ll want to consider which of them was the most successful.

There are some extra columns in the Active tab of the Experiment Tracker Spreadsheet that will help you evaluate each experiment.

Beyond the columns in the spreadsheet, here are a few questions to ask yourself about each experiment:

• Did the results beat the baseline metrics?
• Did the results beat your predictions?
• What was the return on time invested?
• Which experiments had the highest return on time invested?
• Which experiments had the largest improvements over the baseline metrics (on a percentage basis)?

These questions will help you define which experiments were the best, i.e., which experiments are probably worth spending more time doing. The hope is that these tactics will get you to your growth milestone! There’s also a chance that they don’t get you all the way there. That’s where the Growth cycle comes in.

Move on to the next step when you’ve executed and evaluated your experiments.