Testing strategy: avoid the waterfall strategy trap with iterative refinement.
If I could only popularize one idea about technical strategy, it would be that prematurely applying pressure to a strategy’s rollout prevents evaluating whether the strategy is effective. Pressure changes behavior in profound ways, and many of those changes are intended to make you believe your strategy is working while minimizing change to the status quo (if you’re an executive) or get your strategy repealed (if you’re not an executive). Neither is particular helpful.
While some strategies are obviously wrong from the beginning, it’s much more common to see reasonable strategies that fail because they didn’t get the small details right. Premature pressure is one common cause of a more general phenomenon: most strategies are developed in a waterfall model, finalizing their approach before incorporating the lessons that realities teaches when you attempt the strategy in practice.
One effective mechanism to avoid the waterfall strategy trap is explicitly testing your strategy to refine the details. This chapter describes the mechanics of testing strategy:
