If You’re Not Testing, You’re Guessing

And if there’s one place I see businesses struggle, it’s making the shift from “educated guesswork” to a test-driven way of validating product ideas, feature concepts, and market moves.

I get it. Testing sounds simple in theory. In practice, it’s hard. Not because businesses don’t care, but because testing has a few built-in traps that make it easy to avoid, postpone, or do poorly. Over time, I’ve noticed three reasons this happens again and again.

First, our tests are often too big

We design tests the way we design projects: ambitious, thorough, and loaded with effort. They turn into mini-initiatives with weeks of work attached. And once a test looks like a “massive investment,” it stops being a test. It becomes something we delay until the mythical week when everything is calm and nobody is busy. That week does not exist.

So we guess. Not because we’re reckless, but because guessing feels cheaper than building a full-blown experiment.

Second, tests are mentally demanding

Good tests require clarity. They force you to break down a fuzzy idea into a specific hypothesis, identify what you’re trying to learn, and design a small action that can actually teach you something. That’s difficult enough on its own. Then we add a second layer of difficulty: judgment.

We don’t just design a test. We carry our opinions into it. We load it with preconceptions about what “should” happen, what we “know” customers want, and why this idea is “obviously” the right direction. That makes it hard to separate learning from defending the idea. And once a test feels like a referendum on our competence or our instincts, it becomes emotionally heavy, which makes it easier to avoid.

Third, testing demands measurement, and measurement is harder than it looks

A test without a measure is just activity. But finding meaningful measures is genuinely challenging. It’s easy to reach for vanity metrics: numbers that move but don’t mean much. It’s easy to design metrics that look rigorous yet quietly reward the wrong behavior. And it’s easy to fool ourselves with “data” that mostly reflects noise, timing, or wishful thinking. So even when we want to test, we hesitate, because the question becomes: “How will we know what the results mean?”

Put those three together and you get a familiar pattern: we agree testing is important, but the moment we try to do it, it feels bigger, harder, and riskier than expected. Still, the alternative is worse. Because if you’re not testing, you’re guessing. And guessing dramatically increases the odds that you invest time, money, and attention in the wrong direction.

That waste hurts any business. It can be fatal for a startup. And in a disrupted market, it’s especially dangerous. In disruption, the environment shifts while you’re walking through it. A plan based on last quarter’s assumptions can become outdated in weeks. If you keep guessing, you don’t just move slower, you drift into the wrong terrain.

In other words: disruption is a minefield for untested ideas.

The way through isn’t to become perfect at experimentation overnight. It’s to become consistent. To make testing smaller, more frequent, and more honest. To treat evidence as a survival skill, not a “nice-to-have.”

Because businesses don’t fail from lack of ideas. They fail from investing too much in the wrong ideas for too long. If you want help turning your next big guess into a small, useful test, Disruption Dynamics can help. Reply or reach out and we’ll design a simple experiment you can run this week, with clear success criteria.