Graham McNicoll

Even the best product people on Earth have a surprisingly low batting average. In baseball, a .300 hitter is a Hall of Famer. In product, you are lucky if three out of ten ideas actually move the needle. Realizing this is deeply humbling. We are professionals at this. We should be able to beat averages. We want to believe we are visionaries who know exactly what our users or the market wants. But when you track wins and losses, you realize you have been "YOLOing" your roadmap for years. The most elite teams have accepted that their intuition is a starting point, not a conclusion. They stop trying to "swing harder" at single, high-stakes bets. • They maximize "at-bats" through iteration velocity. • They run smaller, faster experiments to find signal. • They treat every failed test as an avoided loss and a moment for learning. Your baseline rises because you LEARN, not because your gut feeling magically improves. Growth is a numbers game. If you want to move the needle, you have to maximize your ITERATION RATE and your learning, not your ego. What is one "guaranteed win" your team shipped that ended up being a flat zero in the data?

Only one snapshot so far — the engagement-over-time curve appears once the daily scrape has captured this post at least twice.