The Fastest Learner Wins

I'm all for speed. That doesn't mean being sloppy. It means that if you move fast, you have the advantage.

At one company I worked at, we had an OKR for an MVP churn-prevention campaign: two simple emails. We dug into the data to find the cohorts most likely to churn, then set out to test whether two nudges back into the product would keep them.

Looking at the data was smart. But the digging and the two emails took more than two months.

Why? Three reasons:

Parkinson's Law. Work expands to fill the time you give it. The OKR set a distant deadline, so the task grew to match.

Management style. That was simply the pace my manager worked at.

Too much oversight. Every step needed a check-in and an approval.

With trust and autonomy, I could have shipped it in two days. In those two months, we could have run a dozen experiments and known what worked and what didn't.

I get where the caution comes from. People are accountable, so they want to be careful. But too much caution turns into fear, and fear slows everyone down.

If you want to learn what works, give your team room to try things, fail, learn, and try again. You don't always need a deep data dive first. Email is one of the simplest and safest channels to test.

It's a big part of why startups win. In her TED talk, Misti Cain describes being on a call with a founder, discussing an idea worth testing. He built the landing page while they were still talking.

Larger companies overthink process and pile on approvals. Empower your team and let them test safely.

Move fast. Learn faster.