Growth Experimentation Velocity

Build a high-output engine to compound small wins into massive growth.

Help the user with growth experimentation velocity using insights from 10 guests and posts across Lenny's Podcast and Newsletter.

How to Help

1. Establish the Baseline - Analyze current conversion funnels and identify the single North Star metric to focus on.
2. Prioritize and Plan - Use frameworks like ICE or RICE to rank experiments by impact and engineering cost.
3. Execute and Iterate - Launch scrappy tests quickly to find signals of life before scaling into robust features.
4. Scale and Socialize - Systematize the sharing of wins and failures across the organization to multiply the impact of every insight.

Core Principles

Search for signs of life

Timothy Davis: "You can always do a very, very small test. You can just put a little money into a platform, see if there's a sign of life. If there is, then you can pull back and say, 'Okay, we have signs of life. Now let's build a campaign around that.'"

Validate new channels or ideas using low-budget tests and narrow match thresholds before committing significant resources.

Embrace the counterfactual

From "How today’s top consumer brands measure marketing’s impact": "Testing/conversion lift studies (CLS): regularly run by marketers to validate what performance would look like if you switched a channel off, or scaled spend up or down."

Use randomized testing and lift studies as the gold standard to observe what would happen without your intervention.

Leverage compounding effects

From "The secret to Duolingo’s exponential growth": "To get the best long-term gains, you should always have a sense of urgency. The quicker you launch winning experiments, the quicker those changes impact your growth. Not only that, but these improvements compound!"

Focus on high experiment velocity because early small wins multiply over time into significant competitive advantages.