Keeping track of hypotheses, experiments and goals in startups

8 points·gfmio··4 comments

What do you use to keep track and share information about your hypotheses, experiments, associated features etc. in your projects / startups?

I feel like it becomes very complicated over time to keep track of all the information your startup receive through those tests and customer interviews and to share this with co-founders and employees. How do you deal with this?

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I find using a simple excel sheet, with the following columns helps me: Objective (what action trying to drive like "increase traffic to site") Lever (overall bucket like email or SEO or PR) Tactic (specific initiative like "write 5 blog posts re: X" or "get 2-3 quality press coverage articles") Metric (how you'll be measuring success like "2x traffic in 4 weeks" or "increase conversion by 4%) Lead (team member responsible) Learnings (summary of findings)

Though it doesn't cover everything, I find it helpful to review with team on Mondays to make sure everyone is on same page about week's priorities and any recent findings.

The trick I find is in sticking to it, whatever the system is.

I've had the same problem. I tried using Basecamp, Trello cards, and spreadsheets, but none really helped organize my thoughts how I wanted. What I did want was somewhere I could define ideas, define tests / hypotheses, and collect feedback so that I could see all this information in one space.

I ended turning this problem into a side project (leanlab.io) which you could checkout ;). I also know that Javelin are doing something similar with experiments (experiments.javelin.com).

- I use heavily google spreadsheets. However after a month of customer development, it becomes messy. Still the best solution I tried. - I tried trello but I ended up spending more time organizing cards. - communication: slack. It's sick!

A notebook and a pen, does the trick for me.

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