6 Books for Validating Business Ideas With Experiments
Embracing experimentation demands that companies rethink what innovation means. Businesses hunger for disruptive, nonlinear innovations that introduce entirely new technologies, transform product categories, or shake up business models. But most innovations are actually humble, small improvements in the user experience or in the workflow. The following six books give you great insights for different types of experimentation challenges: how to set up your company to be able to run multiple experiments simultaneously as well as how to start implementing an experimental mindset within your team.
Experimentation Works
Why read?
When it comes to improving customer experiences, trying out new business models, or developing new products, even the most experienced managers often get it wrong. They discover that intuition, experience, and big data alone don’t work. What does? Running disciplined business experiments. And what if companies roll out new products or introduce new customer experiences without running these experiments? They fly blind.
288 pages, 2020
The Power of Experiments
Why read?
Have you logged into Facebook recently? Searched for something on Google? Chosen a movie on Netflix? If so, you’ve probably been an unwitting participant in a variety of experiments―also known as randomized controlled trials―designed to test the impact of different online experiences. Once an esoteric tool for academic research, the randomized controlled trial has gone mainstream. No tech company worth its salt (or its share price) would dare make major changes to its platform without first running experiments to understand how they would influence user behavior. In this book, Michael Luca and Max Bazerman explain the importance of experiments for decision making in a data-driven world.
232 pages, 2020
Testing Business Ideas
Why read?
7 out of 10 new products fail to deliver on expectations. Testing Business Ideas aims to reverse that statistic. In the tradition of Alex Osterwalder’s global bestseller Business Model Generation, this practical guide contains a library of hands-on techniques for rapidly testing new business ideas.
368 pages, 2019
Experimentation Matters
Why read?
Every company’s ability to innovate depends on a process of experimentation whereby new products and services are created and existing ones improved. But the cost of experimentation is limiting. New technologies–including computer modeling and simulation–promise to lift that constraint by changing the economics of experimentation. They amplify the impact of learning, creating the potential for higher R&D performance and innovation and new ways of creating value for customers. Stefan H. Thomke argues that to unlock such potential, companies must not only understand the power of new technologies for experimentation, but also fundamentally change their processes, organization, and management of innovation. He shows why experimentation is so critical to innovation, explains the impact of new technologies, and outlines what managers must do to integrate them successfully.
320 pages, 2003
Hacking Growth
Why read?
Written by two of the industry pioneers, this book is a comprehensive toolkit or “bible” that any company in any industry can use to implement their own Growth Hacking strategy, from how to set up and run growth teams, to how to identify and test growth levers, and how to evaluate and act on the results. Hacking Growth focuses on customers — how to attain them, retain them, engage them, and monetize them — rather than product.
320 pages, 2017
Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments
Why read?
Getting numbers is easy; getting numbers you can trust is hard. This practical guide by experimentation leaders at Google, LinkedIn, and Microsoft will teach you how to accelerate innovation using trustworthy online controlled experiments, or A/B tests. Based on practical experiences at companies that each run more than 20,000 controlled experiments a year, the authors share examples, pitfalls, and advice for students and industry professionals getting started with experiments, plus deeper dives into advanced topics for practitioners who want to improve the way they make data-driven decisions.
288 pages, 2020