Why Teams Default to "The Old Way"
Most teams don't resist experimentation because they're lazy or stubborn.
They resist it because the environment around them rewards certainty over curiosity. Shipping fast over learning fast. Looking right over being right.
A VP of Growth at a Series B company told me her team kept deferring to the founder's opinions instead of running tests. The founder wasn't always right, but disagreeing with him felt risky. Safer to just build what he wanted and move on.
That's a culture problem.
Culture doesn't change because you put "test more" on a slide deck. It changes when you rewire how decisions get made, how success gets measured, and what behaviors get rewarded.
The 5-Step Framework for Wiring Experimentation Into How Your Team Works
Step 1: Get clear on the outcomes you want
Before you try to change how your team works, you need to define what success actually looks like.
This means creating 2 documents:
A strategy document. This is the what. What outcomes are you driving? What does winning look like? What metrics actually matter?
A growth operations manual. This is the how. How does your team approach the work? What are the systems, processes, and decision-making frameworks you use?
The second one matters more for culture change.
Most teams have some version of a growth strategy doc. Very few have a clear operations manual.
And without one, every new hire has to figure out "how we do things here" by watching what everyone else does. Which means they copy whatever behaviors already exist. Good or bad.
A growth operations manual nails down how your team approaches work. It's a reference doc that shows new people (and reminds existing people) how decisions get made, who owns what, and what principles guide the work.
Growth teams work differently than other teams. If you don't write that stuff down, people will default to whatever the last company they worked at did.
Or worse, they'll just wait for you to tell them what to do.
Step 2: Define team values that push experimentation
Your operations manual should include a set of team values. These are the principles that guide how your team makes decisions when you're not in the room.
These aren't motivational posters. They're decision-making shortcuts.
Here are some values I've used with teams:
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
Challenge assumptions (especially our own)
If you want experimentation baked into your team's culture, one of your values needs to explicitly say so. Something like: "We experiment to figure out what works and what doesn't."
Be specific about how you want people to work. Your values should reflect the way you want decisions to get made.
A bad value: "We prioritize impact."
(Too vague. Everyone thinks they're prioritizing impact.)
A good value: "We test small before we invest big."
(Clear. Actionable. Tells people exactly how to behave.)
Step 3: Launch your values like you'd launch a new feature
Once you've written your team values and operations manual, don't just drop them in a Google Doc and hope people read it.
Treat this like a feature launch:
Share it with your executive team first. Make sure leadership understands how your team will operate and make decisions. If they're not aligned, they'll undercut you later.
Walk your team through it. Don't just send the doc. Schedule time to go through it together. Give people space to ask questions. Let them push back on parts of it.
This isn't a decree. It's a conversation.
Announce it to the company. Share it with the broader org so cross-functional teams know how your team works. This creates transparency and sets expectations for how other teams should work with you.
This process signals that these aren't just words you wrote down once. They're core pieces of how success gets measured.
Step 4: Reinforce and reward experimentation
Cultural change doesn't happen because you wrote something down once.
It happens when you reinforce it every single week.
Wire values into weekly meetings.
In your weekly planning meetings, ask:
What opportunities do we have to experiment this week?
Where are we making assumptions instead of testing?
How can we challenge the way we've always done things?
In 1:1s, ask:
What experiments did you run last week? What did you learn?
Where are you challenging existing assumptions?
What would you test if you had zero constraints?
These questions train people to think like experimenters. Over time, they'll start asking these questions themselves.
Make team values part of performance reviews
Tie your values into performance conversations.
Shout-out people who actively test new ideas, share learnings from failed experiments, and challenge assumptions (even when it's uncomfortable).
A Director of Growth I worked with started explicitly flagging experimentation in performance reviews. She'd say things like: "You ran 8 tests this quarter. 3 worked, 5 didn't. But we learned something from all of them. That's exactly what we need more of."
Her team got the message fast. Failure isn't career-limiting. Not testing is.
Celebrate and share learnings
Publicly recognize team members who test things.
Share their learnings (wins and failures) so the whole team benefits. This does 2 things: it normalizes failure as part of the process, and it shows that you're paying attention.
One team I worked with started a weekly Slack post called "What We Learned This Week." They'd share 2-3 experiment results. What hypothesis they were testing. What they learned. Even when the test lost.
That became the most-read channel in the company.
Step 5: Lead by example
The most powerful way to wire experimentation into your team's culture is to model it yourself.
Share the experiments you're running. Talk openly about experiments that flopped and what you learned.
Show that failure isn't punished. It's expected.
For example: if you want your team to be more comfortable with failure, publicly share a recent test you ran that ate it. Explain what your hypothesis was, why you were wrong, and how you applied that learning to the next thing you tried.
When your team sees you doing this, they'll follow.
I worked with a Head of Growth who started every team meeting by sharing an experiment he was personally running that week. Sometimes it was a big test on the product. Sometimes it was a small tweak to how he ran 1:1s.
The point wasn't the experiment itself. The point was showing his team that he was constantly testing, learning, and iterating. Even on the small stuff.
Within 2 months, his team was doing the same.
Common Roadblocks (and How to Get Past Them)
"My team is afraid of failure."
Start by sharing your own failed experiments publicly. When leaders normalize failure as learning, teams follow.
If you're not willing to admit when you're wrong, don't expect your team to.
"Leadership doesn't support experimentation."
Frame it around business outcomes. Show how experimentation cuts risk and speeds up learning.
Don't pitch "testing for testing's sake." Pitch "learning what works faster than the competition."
"We don't have time to run experiments."
This is usually code for "we don't think experiments are worth the time." Which means you haven't shown the value yet.
Start small. Run one test this week. Share what you learned. Do it again next week. Momentum builds.
"We don't have the tools."
Culture comes first, tools second. You don't need a fancy experimentation platform to test things.
You need clear values, weekly reinforcement, and a leader who's willing to model the behavior.
What Happens When This Works
When you wire experimentation into how your team works, a few things happen:
Your team stops waiting for permission to test. They start proposing experiments on their own.
Meetings shift from "what should we build?" to "what should we test first?"
People stop defending their ideas and start defending the process. (Which is way healthier.)
And your team gets faster at learning what actually moves the business.
You can't force experimentation. But you can build the systems that make it inevitable.
Quick recap:
Define clear team values that push experimentation
Document those values in a growth operations manual
Launch and socialize that manual across your team and company
Reinforce experimentation in meetings, reviews, and recognition
Lead by example by sharing your own experiments and learnings
When leaders create a culture where experimentation is the default, teams stop playing it safe.
