Lean startup methodology connection

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There’s a plethora of business books, few of them truly paradigm-shifting. One of them is “Lean Startup” – a must read for any conversion optimizer.

What I find interesting is that while conversion optimization is not once mentioned in the book, it’s very much the same thing. Only when they talk about it in the context of launching a new business or service, we’re talking about improving the results of a website in any given stage of their life cycle.

The central part of the Lean Methodology is the build-measure-learn cycle:

Lean-Startup-cycle-287x300

In a nutshell it says that from a hypothesis, you can build something. Then, measure the results, and from the data you can validate your hypothesis, and then iterate again.

While they’re trying to figure out how to build something people want (which you do as well if you’re only starting up), most often we’re trying to figure out how to get more people to buy from our site. So for us the same graph would be this:

  1. Ideate. This is the hypothesis we have for tweaking a web page (e.g. product page) for improved conversions.
  2. Build. Based on the hypothesis we create a treatment (new design screen) for the page we’re optimizing.
  3. Product. This is the “treatment” – our new design screen.
  4. Measure. We figure out what needs to be measured, what the metrics are that we care about, and make sure data is being recorded.
  5. Data. Thanks to our measurements we’re gathering useful data (not just conversion data, but any data we might need etc) that we can draw conclusions from.
  6. Learn. We analyze the data, and make conclusions from it.
  7. Back to step 1.

The goal is also to minimize the time it takes to go through the loop. The one who runs the most (statistically significant) experiments wins!

On a sidenote

It’s no coincidence that the Lean Startup book doesn’t mention ‘conversion optimization’. Most conversion guys I know cringe at the term (including Eisenberg brothers who invented it). I believe that in 10 years we won’t talk about ‘conversion optimization’ anymore. It’s going to be called something else. Marketing optimization. Data-driven design. Evidence-based marketing. Who knows. We have to be open about this as well.

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