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Green or red
In product review, any proposed experiment gets two questions: what happens if it comes back green, and what happens if it comes back red? If nobody knows how the strategy would change either way, the thinking is not finished yet.
Thinking through scale
The same mental exercise runs before pen goes on paper or code goes into the system. Picture a thousand times more usage than expected, then ask what knock-on effects follow. PMs are often slowed by worries that legal might object, finance might, or another team might, and thinking it all through first clears those brakes. The internal name for it is know then go.
Aiming for big wins
Not every problem has to be solved up front. Thinking through all of them means more get solved than expected. Rather than a 5% win, the target in a high-growth business is something that moves the whole business and compounds over time.
Why does imagining failure find more risks?
In 1989 the researchers Deborah Mitchell, J. Edward Russo, and Nancy Pennington found that people asked to imagine an event had already happened generated explanations more readily. This approach, called prospective hindsight, raised their ability to identify reasons for an outcome by about 30 percent. The psychologist Gary Klein built it into the pre-mortem, where a team imagines a project has failed and writes down why.
Why decide in advance what a result means?
Deciding what a green or red result will mean before seeing the data keeps the team from bending its reading to fit the outcome. In 1998 the psychologist Norbert Kerr named the opposite habit HARKing, hypothesizing after the results are known. Experimentation practitioners such as Ron Kohavi recommend setting decision rules before an experiment starts. Fixed rules make a result easier to act on, because the response was agreed beforehand.
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