Ashley Stirrup

Everyone celebrates the winning test, but the losing ones are where the real money hides. I sat down with Geoffrey Bell, who has run experiments at Lowe's Companies, Inc., Microsoft, and now Ford Credit, and we talked about why his failed tests built his credibility. His product team wanted to add a vehicle selector early in the prequalification flow. The logic felt obvious: let people pick the car they want, and more of them finish the application. Geoffrey asked to test it first. Two weeks in, completions dropped off sharply. The feature everyone believed in would have cost Ford Credit qualified leads. Leadership saw, in black and white, that testing had just caught an expensive mistake before it reached a single customer. The win wasn't a lift. The win was not shipping the thing. What's a "failed" test that taught your team more than a win ever did?