Who This Helps
This is for Team Leads running the GTM Strategy & Messaging program. You have a list of ideas, but limited time. This routine helps you pick the one that will move the needle most.
Mini Case
Your team has 5 potential messaging tests. One is a new homepage headline, another is a pricing page tweak. Using the scoring system below, you find the headline test scores 28 points, while the pricing tweak scores only 12. You just saved two weeks of work on a low-impact change. That's a win.
Do This Now (5 Steps)
- Potential Impact: How much could this improve our key metric?
- Confidence: How sure are we this will work?
- Ease: How quickly and cheaply can we run this test?
- Gather your team for a quick 30-minute huddle.
- List every experiment idea on a whiteboard or doc. Aim for at least 5.
- Score each idea on three factors (use a 1-10 scale):
- Add the three scores together for each idea.
- The idea with the highest total score is your next experiment. Assign an owner and a one-week deadline.
Avoid These Traps
- The HiPPO Trap: Don't let the Highest Paid Person's Opinion decide. Let the scores decide.
- Shiny Object Syndrome: Ignore the "cool" new idea unless it scores high.
- Analysis Paralysis: Don't debate scores for more than 2 minutes per idea. Go with your gut score and move on.
- Forgetting Resources: Picking a high-impact, high-confidence test that needs 3 engineers for a month is a trap if you have none.
- Skipping the Debrief: Always review what you learned from the last test before picking a new one.
- Testing Tiny Tweaks: Changing a button from blue to green rarely moves the needle. Look for bigger swings.
- No Clear Metric: If you don't know how you'll measure success, you can't score impact. Define it first.
- Ignoring Customer Voices: An idea that comes straight from user interviews gets an automatic +2 on the confidence score.
Your Win by Friday
By Friday, you'll have one clear, high-scoring experiment running. Your team will be focused, not scattered. You'll have a documented reason for your choice, so everyone's aligned. And you'll start building a backlog of scored ideas for next time. That's how you build a repeatable machine, one smart experiment at a time. Go get that win!