Hello and welcome to another episode of hashtag growth.

I'm your host, Matt Biladi, and today I'm super excited to be joined by Vig Mohan Kumar,

who is the tech lead on the growth team here at Drift.

I realize that him and I have what could be podcast episodes basically every single day.

They should be reporting us.

We should just put these mics next to our desk and then like have it live streamed.

I actually think that would be pretty good.

I think people would watch.

So I figured why not just have Vig on the show and we'll have one of these conversations about a topic that we've been going back and forth on a lot lately. Right. So this is my first podcast. So I thought it would be good to have like a piece of paper and a pen to make it look like I'm a veteran of the podcast world. But there's no notes on here. So I won't be using these at all. So especially for all the audio listeners out there, he does have a pen.

There's no notes on here. So I won't be using these at all. So especially for all the audio listeners out there, he does have a pad. I really have a pen. There's no notes. No notes. Probably not going to write anything. No. That's fine. Hand writing's real bad. Okay. So to go ahead and jump into the topic, we've been having a lot of discussions around, call them arguments, if you will, around should we test this thing or should we not, right?

It's, if we're going to test it, it's going to take a week, but we're pretty sure that it's going to work. So why are we going to test it in the first place, right? And so I just want to like toss that out there as a starting point. Yeah. This is definitely the hardest part of like getting started with like

basically growth, which is especially if you come from like a product background, especially in

an early stage company where like we were here for a good amount of time. You usually measured on like,

okay, let's just get this thing out. Yep. Like we have like a channel called shipyard where every

engineer once they put something out on production, you just post in the channel saying, here's what I shipped, and here's how it works, and here's where it is. And especially for me, I would just measure myself on, okay, I got five ships this week, six ships this week. So that would be like my high score counter kind of thing. You're like, that's it. I'm the best engineer. Look at all this value. It's all working. Some of my friends, I'd be like, yo, I got five more shifts than you this week. Very odd dis. Yeah, yeah. So as the company grew, and we started moving into this growth stuff. Yeah, like we started working on this about a year and a half now? A yearish now. It's really tricky because you get to this place where you're like, are the things I'm putting out there actually going to, are they doing anything? Are they actually working? And that's like definitely the reason to A-B test, right? Fundamentally, that's why. But yeah, it's kind of like a big question around like, when should you do it and when should you not? so it's a good point that we're talking about yeah let's dig into that when should we test and when

should we not should we not test when we sit around the room and say we're 90% sure yeah right

before we even run anything we're just our intuition tells us we're so certain that this thing is right.

So intuition is good. So you have to start with the hypothesis, right? So like scientific

method. So you have to start with, okay, why am I doing this? And what do I think it'll actually do?

So if you ship like a new button, you have to have some reason for what impact it's going to have.

So any good experiment starts with that.

So that's good.

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