Graham McNicoll

A bug in our code accidentally set our paywall to zero. Revenue jumped 30%. Usually when you find a bug, you fix it and move on. The number goes back to where it was. Nobody asks questions. Life continues. We had the data. So instead of fixing it, we interrogated it. What we found was that the paywall setting had been decided once, years earlier, and never questioned again. This is the number. It has always been the number. But this assumption was wrong, or perhaps had changed over time. A bug showed us that. We ran the test properly. Tested our way to a new number. Revenue went up permanently. The revenue increase came from being willing to challenge an assumption the team had stopped questioning. The bug just made that visible. Every product org has a version of this. A threshold or a setting, decided once and quietly calcified into fact. The market shifts. Your users shift. The number that was right three years ago may have been costing you since. The most expensive assumptions in your product are the ones nobody is questioning. What would you find if you ran a test on something your team has always just accepted?