> question like "Will we want to change our action in some way based on the result of this test?"
This is my absolute favorite question. I am continually amazed at how much crap it can cut through.
This is my absolute favorite question. I am continually amazed at how much crap it can cut through.
Sometimes there's a belabored debate between two choices and answering this question can reveal that the choices don't have to branch right now, that they have (or could have) a shared 'path prefix', enabling us to make the choice later when we have more information.
The phrase “delay the decision to the last responsible moment” is my favorite mantra about this.
Usually "alphaing" is about no stakes decisions which makes me super annoyed. Team could just make any decision and be done with it.
It's also relevant when people ask for ill-specified 'dashboards', or 'reports'.
Will what we do change substantially based on what we see on these dashboards? If not, why make them? And if so... can we just automate that behavior so we don't have to rely on someone noticing the dashboard?
For those purposes it is difficult to answer 'what will we change' and even harder to automate the process.
If there are five things you always need to go and check when someone asks you ‘is the system running okay?’ Or an alert goes off, by all means put those things on a dashboard.
But when someone just says ‘we want to be able to see these numbers’ it’s often worth asking what they plan to do with them.