Stop wasting time by having principles with Rommil Santiago

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Transcript

Rommil Santiago 0:00
Hi, my name is Rommil Santiago and this is Experiment Nation, the Short Podcast, a podcast series about experimentation for folks who have no time for podcasts. in under five minutes, I’ll share some of my most recent thoughts about the industry and the craft of experimentation. Let’s get to it.

Rommil Santiago 0:25
In growth, CRO or experimentation, one of the most common challenges is trying to figure out what to test. A lot of content out there speaks about performing research and digging into analytics. But today, I want to talk about something I like to do in my own practice, and I find helpful and that is having guiding principles. Guiding Principles, at least as I like to call them are the agreed to boundaries, values and ideals that bound potential solutions. Why would I find these helpful? Let’s consider the following hypothetical example.

Rommil Santiago 0:54
Let’s say our goal is to make Jane happy, there are many ways to come up with ideas on how to make Jane happy. By conducting research, we could discover the main reason that Jane isn’t happy is they are hungry, I mean, who doesn’t get a little hangry. From time to time, we could brainstorm all day long about ways to satisfy that hunger solutions could range from things like offering a bologna sandwich to making a salad to building a restaurant next to their house. Now, we could potentially try each one of these, but it wouldn’t be an efficient use of time, take that same situation, but this time going in, the team agrees that they will prioritize solutions that won’t involve killing animals, or cost more than a certain amount of money or take a certain amount of time.

Rommil Santiago 1:36
This would rule out the sandwich and building a restaurant. Now with a smaller area to explore. The team can focus their ideation on what kind of salad to offer Jean, notice how guiding principles do more than align teams on what they should do. They also tell people what they shouldn’t do. These guidelines usually are informed by company’s core competencies. Its OKR its competition its available resources. An important note is to treat guiding principles as a filter on generating ideas after they are generated.

Rommil Santiago 2:05
Don’t hinder the ideation process too much up front, but rather look at the ideas generated and start either rolling them out or tweaking them so they align with your principles.

Rommil Santiago 2:14
Finally, another positive benefit of having guiding principles is that it speeds up decision making which can also shorten the time spent ideating. How do you speed up your ideation process? My name is Rommil Santiago. Until next time,

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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