Too often developers work on features without confirming whether the desired business outcomes are being met.
Even when we discover that a given feature isn't achieving the desired results, making corrections to the feature may be out prioritized by other new features, ensuring that the under performing feature will never achieve its intended business goal. The most inefficient way to test a business model or product idea is to build the complete product to see whether the predicted demand actually exists.
We should perform the cheapest and fastest experiments possible to validate the through user research whether the intended feature will actually achieve the desired outcomes. Techniques: hypothesis driven development, customer acquisition funnels, A/B testing.
Culture of innovation, encouraging teams to take an experimental approach to product development and exhorting leadership to support them. Instead of focusing on the boss's vote, the emphasis is on getting real people to really behave in real experiments and basing your decisions on that. What is needed is a system where every employee can do rapid, high velocity experiments.
By making software deployments and releases fast and safe, the team made user experimentation and any required production changes a low risk activity that could be performed during the highest traffic and revenue generating periods.
The faster we can experiment, iterate and integrate feedback into our product or service, the faster we can learn and out experiment the competition.