How to Create a Culture of Experimentation on Your Growth Team

One of the most common challenges I hear from growth leaders is: How do I create a culture of experimentation on my team? They know they want their teams to test and iterate more, but despite talking about it, their teams default to the way things have always been done.

I’ve worked with many clients on this exact issue. Here’s a step-by-step approach that can help you drive meaningful change and make experimentation a core part of your team’s DNA.

1. Get Clear on the Outcomes You Want

Before changing your team’s culture, you need to define what success looks like. This means creating two key artifacts:

• A strategy document – This outlines what your team is trying to accomplish. What outcomes are you driving toward? What does success look like?

• A growth operations manual – This focuses on how your team approaches that work. It outlines the systems, processes, goals, and decision-making frameworks your team should use.

The second document is often more critical when trying to drive cultural change.

A well-structured growth operations manual will help standardize how your team approaches work and reinforce the behaviors you want to encourage.

2. Define Team Values that Encourage Experimentation

A core part of your operations manual should be a set of team values - principles that guide how your team makes decisions, especially when you’re not in the room. These values should reflect how you want your team to work, not just what you want them to accomplish.

Here are some examples of values I’ve used with teams in the past:

• Focus on learning and sharing insights with the organization.

• Prioritize delivering value to users as quickly as possible.

• Use data to inform decisions, not just internal opinions.

• Test before making deep investments.

• Favor simple solutions that scale.

If you want to embed experimentation into your team’s culture, one of your key values should be something like: We experiment to figure out what works and what doesn’t.

3. Launch Your Values Like a New Feature Release

Once you’ve defined your team values and created your growth operations manual, you need to roll it out intentionally. Treat it like a new feature launch:

1. Share it with your executive team. Make sure leadership is aligned with how your team will operate and make decisions.

2. Introduce it to your team. Walk them through the values and give them space to ask questions about what this means for their day-to-day work.

3. Announce it to the company. Share the manual with the broader organization to create transparency and help cross-functional teams understand how your team operates.

This process signals that these values are not just words on a slide, they’re core pieces of how your team works and how success is measured.

4. Reinforce and Reward Experimentation

Cultural change doesn’t happen just because you wrote something down. You need to reinforce it in how you run your team.

Incorporate Values into Weekly Meetings

In your weekly planning meetings, ask questions like:

• What opportunities do we have to experiment this week?

• How can we challenge the way we’ve always done things?

In 1:1s, ask a similar version:

• What experiments did you run last week? What did you learn?

• Where are you challenging existing assumptions?

Make Team Values Part of Performance Reviews

Tie these values into your performance conversations. Recognize team members who actively apply your team values: testing new ideas, learning from failure, and driving impact through experimentation.

Celebrate and Share Learnings

Publicly recognize team members who embrace experimentation. Share their learnings, both wins and failures, so the whole team benefits from their insights.

5. Lead by Example

As a growth leader, one of the most powerful ways to embed experimentation into your team’s culture is to model it yourself.

• Share the experiments you are running.

• Talk openly about experiments that didn’t work and what you learned.

• Show that failure isn’t punished, it’s an essential part of learning.

For example, if you want your team to be more comfortable with failure, publicly share a recent test you ran that didn’t go as expected. Explain what your hypothesis was, why you were wrong, and how you applied that learning to future work.

When your team sees you doing this, they’ll be more likely to embrace experimentation themselves.

Final Thoughts

Creating a culture of experimentation isn’t about forcing your team to run more tests. It’s about embedding experimentation into how they work.

To make this shift:

1. Define clear team values that prioritize experimentation.

2. Document those values in a growth operations manual.

3. Launch and socialize that manual across your team and company.

4. Reinforce experimentation in meetings, reviews, and recognition.

5. Lead by example by sharing your own experiments and learnings.

When leaders create a culture of experimentation and normalize learning from failure - teams stop playing it safe.