Experiment & Iterate
Resources to help you experiment & iterate.
Books
David J. Bland, Alexander Osterwalder
Testing Business Ideas explains how systematically testing business ideas dramatically reduces the risk and increases the likelihood of success for any new venture or business project. This book contains hands-on techniques for rapidly testing new business ideas.
John Sharp, Colleen Macklin
The authors explain how to fail better - the secret is iteration, the cyclical process of conceptualizing, prototyping, testing, and evaluating. Sharp and Macklin describe iterative methods from a wide variety of fields.
Marty Cagan
This book describes how to structure and staff a product organization, and how to discover and deliver technology products that customers will love, and that will work for your business.
Articles
To successfully innovate, companies need to make experimentation an integral part of everyday life, by creating an environment where employees’ curiosity is nurtured, data trumps opinion, anyone can conduct or commission a test, all experiments are done ethically, and managers embrace a new model of leadership.
Working in small iterative steps ensures that decisions are cheap and changeable. Make quick decisions in order to make a better one.
An excerpt of an interview where the Facebook CEO shares how his obsession with testing everything has helped his company scale.
In an iterative approach to user interface design, rapid prototyping is the process of quickly mocking up the future state of a system, be it a website or application, and validating it with a broader team of users, stakeholders, developers and designers. Doing this rapidly and iteratively generates feedback early and often in the process, improving the final design and reducing the need for changes during development.
Media & Interactive
In this Masters of Scale podcast episode, Reid Hoffman speaks with Mark Zuckerberg about his mantra “move fast and break things”. Read the transcript (PDF, 135 KB).
This short video from Harvard Business School shows how innovative ideas do not arise from intuition, so widespread experimentation helps companies quickly find ideas that work.
In this 4-minute video, Nielsen Norman Group's Don Norman talks about rapid prototyping and iteration to learn and improve, and how we can adapt and make it work in today's agile world.