Graham McNicoll

Ask any product manager what they hate most about their job, and the answer is rarely the work itself. It is the meetings where opinion fights opinion and whoever is loudest wins. Before experimentation, we shipped products based on vibes. Leadership said they wanted a feature. The team went and built it. We launched it. Everyone celebrated. That was it. A lot of those features silently failed. No one looked back. No one kept score. When you adopt experimentation, something uncomfortable starts happening. You ship the big feature. You A/B test it. It loses. Months of work, and it did not move any metric it was supposed to move. The natural next question is the useful one. Could we have learned this earlier? What is the smallest thing we could have built to see if this was worth the time? Sometimes the answer is a painted door test. Sometimes it is a one-day build instead of a three-month build. Either way, when you consider validating ideas earlier, your iteration cycles start getting shorter. That brings me to a part of this process that people don't consider. When you remove the ego and the battle of wills from product decisions, work gets friendlier. Nobody has to defend their status. Nobody has to win the meeting. Everyone is open to being wrong. Everyone is open to being right. The company becomes a dramatically better place to work. That is the quiet benefit of experimentation nobody writes about. Your roadmap gets better, and your team stops dreading meetings. If your product culture is stuck in argument mode, see how experiment results change the room at growthbook.io/experiments, or send me a DM.