Lesson: Idea Execution with Noor Siddiqui

Step #7 Experimenting: Find the right balance of how long to spend on experiments

There definitely processes with changing what you're working on. That's your job, I guess, as a founder or as a leader is to try to figure out what's the most efficient path to getting your product deployed or getting your user base or whatever your end game is, your job as a founder is try to find the most efficient path there. Weigh the costs and benefits, do a loyalty chart, I don't know.

I think that's a really good question to think about how long do you pursue a specific execution strategy single-mindedly so I think about this as you're either heads down or you're above ground and you're thinking about other things. So I think it's really important to be heads down about something for some specific amount of time that you agree on with your cofounder and your team. And you say, “Hey, for two weeks we're really going to try to talk to only surgeons. We're only going to talk to surgeons about this one use case that we want to pursue and we're going to be dead focused on that.”

It's like you're offsetting between breadth and depth, so depth is what happens when you go heads down and then breadth is what happens when you pick your head up and you say, “Okay, we talked to a lot of surgeons, we've gotten a lot of feedback, but I'm really curious what ophthalmologists think, or I'm really curious about what someone else thinks.” And again capping that time saying, “Okay, we're going to spend two days thinking about other directions we can go in, and then we're going to go heads down again and we're going to focus on something.”

I think it's very dependent on what your circumstance is, but it's really important to get both breadth and depth and to decide on execution strategy for a long enough time where you can actually see it through because there's no point in half-assing something. So if you only half-ass an execution strategy, you didn't accomplish anything. You don’t know whether you failed or succeeded. So you need to commit to it for a fixed amount of time where you can actually assess whether it failed or succeeded, and then it does make sense based on that binary assessment if it is binary, to say, “Okay, it failed, so I'm going to think about it again and pursue something else.”