How can you ensure your test strategy accommodates future growth?

At the risk of pointing out the obvious, one of the key factors that are so often overlooked when it comes to testing any creative strategy is to continuously keep your finger on different pulses of what is happening in the world around you. Seek out those conversations with new people in new industries. Consume content you find to go against your principles. Every single day try to find out something new about how trends and behaviours are evolving. Having this wider sense and breadth of reference is enormously under-valued in the creative space, yet, it can significantly impact the success of how we test new strategies. Fusing something from a different place into what you doing might just make you and your brand INNOVATIVE.

Ensuring that our testing strategy accommodates future growth is crucial, and it hinges on the fundamental importance of multidisciplinary teams. By fostering collaboration across diverse skill sets, we can create a robust framework that not only addresses current challenges but also has the adaptability needed to thrive in an ever-evolving landscape.

First of all, design your test strategy with scalability in your mind. You should be able to test strategy that not only meets the current needs of your project, but also accommodates future growth.

A lot of my test strategies didn't get past the approval process or even get past my team's judgments. I was discouraged at first but after a few years, my mindset changed. Every test strategy is a dummy to companies but it is a reality to the person who creates it. It takes experience and effort to create any test strategy. I always learned something from creating them. I feel more proud of all the tests I have created, most of them were failed ones. Without them, I wouldn't be able to create the ones that were picked up and implemented.

To build an effective testing strategy, you must first understand the context of your product and business. Analyze your target users, business goals, technical constraints, and potential growth areas. As Steve Jobs said, "You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology." Recommended tools: UserTesting, Lookback, FullStory

Testing in a "lab environment" doesn't always deliver the same result as what happens in the real world. We often try to test components in isolation as this helps us to identify individual points of failure. This is a very useful strategy, but not sufficient. You should also try to test everything in environments that are as close to real world usage as possible. For creative messaging for example, testing content with people in your office will deliver a very different result than just putting content out and measuring the impact. It's not always possible to test in the real world, but using AI tools like computer vision to see how people react can help get you closer to real world environment, and real world emotions.

Select testing methods that will scale with your product. Prioritize automation over manual testing. Leverage A/B testing for new features. Consider a synthetic monitoring tool like Locust to simulate load. As David Ogilvy put it, "Give me the freedom of a tight brief." Constraints drive creativity. Recommended tools: Selenium, Locust, Optimizely

Scalability:Design your test infrastructure to scale easily with increased demand. This includes both hardware and software components. Flexibility:Build a test strategy that can adapt to changes in technology, business processes, and requirements. Implement modular Automation:Invest in test automation to handle repetitive and time-consuming tasks. Monitoring and Analytics: Implement robust monitoring tools to keep track of system performance and user behavior. Analyze this data to identify areas for improvement and anticipate future needs. Documentation:Maintain comprehensive documentation for your test strategy. This includes test cases, automation scripts, and any specific configuration

Structure regular test cycles rather than ad hoc testing. Define regression test suites to run on every build. Schedule scalability tests under projected load. Take an iterative approach, as Elon Musk advocates: "Iterate rapidly to accelerate learning." Frequent testing builds quality. Recommended tools: CI/CD pipelines, TestRail, qTest

Thoroughly document your test plans, cases, results and defects. Share knowledge across the team. Make it easy for new hires to ramp up. As David Droga says, "Talent is ten percent inspiration and ninety percent documentation." Recommended tools: Confluence, Jira, GitHub

Growth requires adaptation. When you’re crafting a strategy, scalability and flexibility should be at the core whenever possible. Aside from the important function it serves, it influences your perspective proactively. Being open to change and losing bias can fuel entirely new paths to growth.

I think an effective change management system should be in place to ensure any changes are managed in an effective way. Revision history with proper justification should be kept to ensure traceability.

People also keep shying away from the results of experiments that didn't work and that is often the biggest disservice we can do to them. In a lot of cases, it's not the entire experiment that's incorrect, but a small aspect that possibly needs to be tweaked for it to go from failure to success (change the timing, or an aspect or a comms line). So documenting experiments, reviewing them carefully, and further testing them is an essential of testing and experimentation.

Reevaluate your strategy with each major release. As the product grows, assess new risks, features and thresholds. Adapt your testing to match the pace of innovation. Or as Sam Altman puts it, "The rate of change is increasing; you have to double down on learning."

A lot of marketers don't give themselves room to experiment. An essential part of budget planning should be putting aside money for experimentation. I have talked about the 70-20-10 model in depth. Not more than 70% of budgets should go into existing ideas that work well. 20% should go towards new ideas and 10% towards complete moonshots. This ensures that you are constantly experimenting and attempting to give your customer something new as well. And this 30% can have an outsized impact when it really clicks.

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