You’ve got a great idea. It’s aligned with your goals and creates a better customer experience or helps you put data to use in a new way.
There’s just one problem—the tech you have isn’t set up to bring your idea to life.
So you make your pitch, gather resources, prioritize against other needs, build a project plan, kick it off, expand the scope, push the timeline, put it on hold, start it up again, go live, work out some bugs, and look at the numbers (wait, which numbers?). Somewhere along the way, you wonder if all that effort didn’t quite deliver what you thought it would… speaking of which, what exactly did you expect?
What you hoped for was not a system that checks every box on your spreadsheet of deliverables. You were hoping for a change that moves the needle on the business challenge that sparked that idea in the first place. Testing is complete, status meetings are wrapped, and deliverables are in hand… but—remind me—where’s the outcomes checklist?
I’d like to suggest starting with the following questions:
- What does success look like?
- How will we measure it?
- What assumptions are we making?
- What would confirm our approach or suggest a pivot?
- What is the least amount of effort that we can responsibly invest to explore this idea?
This last question should be the starting point for making any changes to your tech stack. It refers not just to tech stack changes but also to your feedback loops—how success is defined, measured, and what information you need to take a next step. These should help define the outcome you hope to achieve.
Crucially, I suggest you flip the common starting point of “what would a good system look like to make this new process sustainable” into “what is the least I need from my systems to test this?”
You might not need a new tool.
You might not need automation.
You might not need data synced from other systems.
You do need to clearly define which levers you’re pulling.
You do need agreement about what measurements matter.
You do need to have a thoughtful conversation about the results.
Minimizing system changes can mean more manual work in the short run. A human imports spreadsheets to move data between systems, or pastes numbers into Excel for cohesive reporting. You're thinking that these are the repetitive tasks that your modern tech stack is supposed to eliminate, right?
Wrong.
Your tech stack’s job is to give you leverage. Leverage only matters when you’re going in the right direction. Skipping the cost of tooling up to go in the wrong direction will significantly reduce the time it takes to validate an idea. If it didn’t work, the downside is minimized. If it did work, you will have much higher confidence investing in a permanent solution.
The next time you’re evaluating a new idea, don’t think about your ideal system. Ask how you’ll evaluate success and what the simplest path to try it out looks like. You’ll stay more focused on outcomes and can put resources into expanding ideas that you already know are working.
