The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

by Eric Ries

Any team can create a true split-test experiment that affects only the sandboxed parts of the product or service (for a multipart product) or only certain customer segments or territories (for a new product). However: 2. One team must see the whole experiment through from end to end. 3. No experiment can run longer than a specified amount of time (usually a few weeks for simple feature experiments, longer for more disruptive innovations). 4. No experiment can affect more than a specified number of customers (usually expressed as a percentage of the company’s total mainstream customer base). 5. Every experiment has to be evaluated on the basis of a single standard report of five to ten (no more) actionable metrics. 6. Every team that works inside the sandbox and every product that is built must use the same metrics to evaluate success. 7. Any team that creates an experiment must monitor the metrics and customer reactions (support calls, social media reaction, forum threads, etc.) while the experiment is in progress and abort it if something catastrophic happens.