Common failures
Common failures
Running too many channels at once. It feels like ambition and looks like progress, but spreading a small budget and smaller attention across six motions guarantees none of them get the focus to compound. It happens because saying no to a channel feels like leaving money on the table. Avoid it by choosing two or three primary motions, funding them properly for a full quarter, and putting everything else on an explicit not-now list.
Optimising the wrong stage. Teams pour effort into the top of the funnel when the real leak is deeper, because top-of-funnel work is more visible and feels more like growth. The fix is the funnel model: find the stage where a fixed improvement buys the most revenue, and aim there even when it is the boring stage nobody wants to work on.
No success threshold set before launch. When you decide afterwards whether an experiment worked, every result becomes a win, because you will always find a story. This happens because writing the threshold first feels pedantic. Avoid it by committing the number that means keep, scale, or kill before the test goes live, in writing, where you cannot quietly move it later.
Killing motions too early. Channels compound over weeks and months, so judging a motion after three weeks of soft results kills things that would have worked. It comes from impatience and from confusing a quiet start with a failure. Set a real measurement window, usually a quarter, before you decide, and hold yourself to it.
Cadence that lives in someone's head. "We review growth regularly" is not a cadence, it is an intention, and intentions lose to the urgent every single week. The cause is treating discipline as a personality trait rather than a calendar entry. Fix it by booking the weekly review as a real recurring meeting with a fixed agenda, so it runs regardless of mood or fire.
No memory, so lessons get relearned. Without a durable log, the same failed idea gets proposed and re-tested every few months at full cost. It happens because writing things down is the easiest task to skip when you are busy. Make the log a byproduct of the weekly review and every experiment close-out, so capturing the lesson is part of the work rather than an extra chore.