Score your learnings against your success criteria

Before deciding what's next, measure where you actually landed versus where you said you wanted to be.

Instructions

Before deciding what to do next, you need an honest read of where you actually landed. This is harder than it sounds. The data is rarely unambiguous. Some things went well, some didn't, and the temptation is to focus on the parts that confirm whatever you already want to do.

The most useful frame is to go back to the success criteria you defined before launch — or to reconstruct them honestly if you didn't write them down — and assess the evidence against each one. Not narratively, and not charitably. The goal is to build a picture that a sceptical outside observer would recognise as accurate.

The hardest question in this step is the one about your core assumptions. Before you launched, you had beliefs about the problem, the users, and the solution. The evidence you've gathere...