Graham McNicoll

It's really hard when you really believed in feature, you managed to get it prioritized, you shipped it to production, and then it fails. If you don't have the right culture around separating a lost test from a bad idea, that becomes a real problem. A couple of things help. One is to acknowledge that this is just one version of a hypothesis. It's a materialized hypothesis, this specific version you tested, and it doesn't necessarily mean the idea is bad. It could be that this version of the hypothesis is bad, and maybe you should test something else. Having the wisdom to know the difference is hard, and I don't think anyone has a magic answer for it. The other part is just keeping a culture that's open to failing. And the way you do that is by reframing it from failing to learning. So you didn't fail on the test, you actually learned something important about your product that challenged some assumptions you had. You celebrate that, and it creates a much more positive culture where people are willing to experiment and try different things.