Tiny experiments: how lean teams de-risk everything

Lean teams can't afford the big-bang campaign that fails in month six. Dylan Bosman's operating principle, borrowed and credited and battle-tested at BluLever, is to never let an unproven idea get big enough to hurt you.

"You have to get comfortable doing a lot with a little — then get good at checking that what you're doing is having an impact. Break the bigger project into little windows where you can re-evaluate. Do a portion you can measure as an MVP, look at the results, keep adjusting. You can't just roll out a strategy and look one quarter later."

He credits the term "tiny experiments" to writer Anne-Laure Le Cunff, and applies it anywhere the team enters new territory: a bit of SEO before an SEO budget, two YouTube videos before a content strategy. The discipline is the re-evaluation window, decided in advance. What will we measure, when will we look, and what result earns the next tranche of effort?

The loop

1. Slice. Cut the smallest version of the idea that produces a measurable signal.

2. Stake. Write down, before starting, the metric, the review date, and the result that unlocks the next slice.

3. Ship and check. Run the slice, and at the window compare against the stake rather than against your hopes.

4. Scale, adjust or stop. All three are wins, and a cheap "stop" is the experiment doing its job.

Unglamorous and effective beats visionary and vague

The cultural half of this produced the line we'd print on a T-shirt if the brand guidelines allowed it. Not every winning play is portfolio material, and sometimes it's the cheap email that simply works. As Dylan put it to us: "No one's going to call Terence a visionary, but it gets the job done cheaply." Creativity lives within the constraint of the business generating income. The maturity moment for every lean marketer is the day the mundane, measurable win feels as satisfying as the award entry.

And every experiment has a second audience, which is the people who approved it. Dylan's practice, learnt from a co-founder, is to get marketing in front of the whole business at least quarterly and ideally monthly: "this is what we created, this is how you should use it." Do that and the business's inevitable marketing opinions start arriving pre-aligned to strategy, and people invite you into the brainstorm rather than handing you the strategy they've already decided.

Try this week: take your biggest planned initiative and cut the first slice. What could you learn in three weeks for a tenth of the budget? Write the stake for it today: metric, date, threshold. Then book the monthly marketing showcase to the business. Ten minutes, one experiment, one lesson.

Sourced from recorded, on-the-record interviews on the South African Digital Marketing Podcast. Every practitioner quoted above is named in the text.

First published on the SA Marketers' Circle.