Did you test the right thing?

Many teams celebrate shipping features but miss the critical question: did you actually test what you set out to learn? The gap between what teams think they tested and what they actually tested can be surprisingly wide. Your experiment design determines whether you generate valid learning or just collect meaningless data. Testing entire ideas instead of specific assumptions creates muddy results that leave you guessing about what worked and what didn't. This wastes precious time and resources while giving you false confidence about your direction. The most valuable experiments isolate your riskiest assumption and test it directly. Before running any test, clearly define your "leap of faith" assumption. What single belief, if proven wrong, would force you to reconsider your entire approach? Design your experiment to test only that assumption, not the whole solution. This clarity transforms vague feedback into actionable insights that guide your next steps.^[1]