Rick Kuwahara
I came across another gem of an article that was shared with the Growthhackers.com community recently (a big reason why their a must join community on my Growth List).
The article was written by Shanelle Mullin of ConversionXL and talked about High Velocity Testing (or High Tempo Testing) and if moving fast was really an essential for driving growth.
So how do you get started with High Tempo Testing?
What is High Tempo Testing?
As it mentions in the post, High Tempo Testing is “the philosophy that rapid testing and experimentation is the key to major growth.”
Shanelle goes on to quote Sean Ellis from a case study he wrote where he says, “The more tests you run, the more you learn about how to grow your business.”
This simple statement really speaks to the core of High Tempo Testing. You need to test and experiment with purpose to extract real growth. You can’t just test fast and haphazardly and expect to get sustained results.
Establish your High Tempo Testing framework
The first thing you should do is set the ground rules you’re going to play by to build your High Tempo Testing on.
A quick disclaimer here, that one of the keys to anything growth related is that the entire organization should be bought in. This is especially true in larger organizations where things can get more departmentalized. Remember, growth is a team game!
There are a few different ways to set up a framework for High Tempo Testing, but they all boil down to five parts:
- Creating Ideas – Be sure that you are involving your entire organization when trying to come up with ideas to test. This is especially true when you have a high volume goal like 10 new tests started each week. You need a big backlog to make sure you don’t run out of tests.
- Prioritizing the Ideas – There are a few ways to prioritize your backlog, like “ICE,” “TIR,” or “PIE“, but just be sure that you are consistent in prioritizing across the impact a test would make, any hard or soft costs to implement, and how easy it is to run.
- Executing the Ideas – Be sure to set a clear hypothesis and goal of each test with a specific timeframe that will get you the significance or direction you need to make a decision. Make sure you have the systems in place to track the data you’ll need to measure results.
- Analyzing Results – Once your test is done, be sure to document everything in a document that can capture your learnings and be archived for anyone to look back on.
- Implement or Start Over – After you’ve extracted your insights you’ll have to make a choice, implement your insight or take that insight and put it into another test.
Tools to help stay organized
With all the tests flying around and timeframes overlapping, it will be essential to stay organized. This is especially important for larger teams. Here are a few ways to do that.
- Projects from Growthhackers – Currently a beta and spawned from their own team, this is a one-stop web app to manage your tests from ideation to archive.
- Experiment Engine – A neat tool to also help manage your test projects, really geared towards A/B tests
- Trello – A simple drag n’ drop visual project management tool. This can easily be set up to track experiments across a team.
- Google Docs – Kind of self-explanatory. Set up a Google Sheet to track ideas and have it be shareable across your team.
- Microsoft Excel – The only downside with this is not being able to easily share it across your team unless you use a file sharing service like Dropbox.
Take your first step
At Paubox, we are just starting to use high-tempo testing. The first step we took was to decide on how many tests we wanted to run each week. This can vary depending on your team size, but make sure it’s a manageable number that’s a slight stretch.
After that, get started on filling your backlog with ideas to test.
Have you implemented High Tempo Testing at your company? I’d love to hear how you got started and what you’ve learned so far in the comments below.
