Test and Learn
ADAPTOVATE coaches organisations to test and learn, creating “safe to fail” environments that reward learning and deliver valuable outcomes.
Test and learn is set of Agile practices that allows a business to test with real customers, real products, to understand impacts on experience and productivity. From there, you learn what needs to be improved, and you do it repeatedly. It is efficient, cost effective, and delivers a greater return on investment.
When testing and learning, we see where there is resistance to the direction of the product or service development we had planned, and when there is, we do further tests to see if there are things we can work around. When we do not meet resistance, we continue to build our product or service one step at a time, constantly sense checking to understand if we are still heading in the right direction.
We can test & learn in 5 steps:
- Plan where we are going first. We develop a hypothesis to understand what we are testing e.g. “Our customers like load time of web pages to be less than 10 seconds”
- Talk with team members to make sure we are aligned on what we are testing .
- Pause along the way to check we are still aligned to our overall destination e.g. build a web page to deliver the customers expectations.
- Listen for feedback from the customer.
- Learn along the way, pausing regularly to see what we are doing right and what we need to change.
If we do not test and learn, we risk unintended consequences which will take longer to recover from, we also risk going the wrong direction, finding out that our destination does not exist.
If we do not test and learn, we risk unintended consequences which will take longer to recover from, we also risk going the wrong direction, finding out that our destination does not exist.
Showcasing the result of team’s work at the end of every cycle of work called a sprint serves that exact purpose. A proper showcase is an opportunity “test” the result of work with key stakeholders, invite and discuss feedback to “learn”. This is the time and place to discuss the particular result of the sprint work and also investigate recent market developments and customer trends, moves of key competitors as well as to discuss any customer feedback available, e.g., usage statistics or qualitative feedback on the functionalities developed and released so far. The objective here is to make sure all the relevant information is considered to improve and maximize the value of work.
ADAPTOVATE coaches organizations in adopting agile test and learn practices, releasing the Minimum Viable Products to customers with just enough functionalities to test and learn, and creating “safe to fail” environments that reward learning.
Find out how ADAPTOVATE can support your organisation utilise agile test and learn practices to maximise outcomes
Test and learn practices minimise wasted effort by getting early feedback.
Customer, stakeholders and team members feel ‘bought in’ to a collaborative product development process.
Test and learn promotes short, iterative cycles where quality is checked continually.
