This is how marketing leaders punch above their weight to run trajectory-changing growth experiments

Remember what Froot Loops taste like? You can bite into a whole 12-pack of these as cookies now. The Momofuku restaurant family dominates creating nostalgic desserts.

This is the brainchild of pastry chef Christina Tosi. She’s a huge deal—even my kids know her name. I’ve brought Cereal Milk cookies home from Milk Bar. My girls have rewatched Bake Squad on Netflix a dozen times. Once more is a baker’s dozen🧁! (Oof. Had to.)

Not everything soaked in cereal milk sells.

Watch Netflix’s “Chefs Table: Pastry” episode. You can hear Momofuku founder David Chang narrating their adoption of experimentation. New treats are tested with restaurant diners. Feedback gets baked into the next day's batch. Only the best make it onto the menu.

Importantly—watch the background. It’s buzzing! Milk Bar doesn’t succeed on Christina’s talent alone. Dessert dominance takes an army of talent to support her vision.

Every professional in that restaurant contributes their talent. They might carry a spatula, a menu or a notebook. Doesn’t matter—their work contributes to the goal uncovering which cookies sell best.

How do you begin to measure the performance of team learning? What’s fair?

It’s all about rewarding inputs before outputs:
if your pastry chef is learning to bake a new cake, evaluate the quality of her dough *and* the final product—icing and all.

This head-smackingly simple concept will explain what can be managed:

Experimentation Output = Quality x Quantity

Quality is a team’s ability to develop suitable solutions to customer problems. The bolder the better. Applying deep craft expertise to conquer complexity. It’s a commitment to judgement-free discourse. These elements bring rigorous research, stronger evidence and flawless test execution.

Quantity gets unlocked with velocity. It’s the seamless hand-off of designer prototypes into code. It’s decision-making autonomy. It’s the rhythm of cross-functional rituals. It’s having access to instant data. It’s doing our jobs a little bit faster than our competitors do.

How do you improve both of these? You invest in skills and expand participation.

Anyone in the organization can contribute learning how to better serve customers:

• Customer success reps know your customer’s pains

• QA analysts know the product’s gaps (and workarounds)

• New hires haven’t developed blinders yet—they can see the invisible

Before you go there, no—experiment is not a distraction for these teammates.

Serving diners a brand-new tiny tiramisu cake-ball for dessert 🟤 isn't a distraction for the Momofuku waitstaff: it is the most important thing they’ll do that day to innovate upon the menu.

1. Diversity of thought yields higher-quality experiments, both in technical execution and creativity. Skilled participation allows experts and people with customer knowledge to weigh in. This adds value to the prototype and will flag risks early.

2. Failing gracefully is a learned skill. We weren’t raised to be good at losing. Watch any kids' sports movie—there’s an entire 90-minute story arc before the team learns the value of teamwork. When we experiment and fail, it can hurt. Knowing how to communicate feedback in an empathetic and non-judgmental way takes practice.

3. Maximize returns by communicating and amplifying lessons. A single experiment’s success has limited value. However: share, adopt, and implement that success across the business and you've amplified a small win into a monster. High-participation teams see better results because they compound that growth across channels and products.

4. “Shared joy is double the joy; a burden shared is half the burden.” Winning as a group will create bonds in the team. Meanwhile, sharing challenges as a team reduces the risks. Say goodbye to fear-based decisions and conservative targets. Welcome creative boldness, anticipating risks, cooperating on goals and sharing resources. We rob teams of community when we isolate experimentation to one function alone.

5. Skilled teams operate on principle and follow through. Innovation is usually less fluid and more frame. Most teams don’t inherently know when to move quickly, when to refine an idea, or when to drop an idea altogether. They use a framework for that. Agile teams establish governing principles, agree on actions, and define limits before a test even begins.

There it is. The secret to amplified results as a marketer really is as simple as bringing in more brains on a problem. It’s the teamwork trope, sure, but appreciate the nuance:

• contributors need experiment skills to participate meaningfully

• empathy takes practice

After reading this I’m hopeful that more leaders will open up the doors to daily standup—expanding the growth program to gather outside expertise.

When your daily standup expands remember to bring extra snacks - nobody wants to take the very last cereal milk cake ball 🧁.

Rude.

Thanks for reading. I’m on a mission to bring science back into decisions from startup to enterprise. I teach teams how to test using smart goals, rituals, customer empathy and principles. Help yourself to my experiment templates designed for marketers.

See you next time.