Dave Naffziger's Blog

Whether you’re building a website, launching an adwords campaign or running an email newsletter, the information cycle is critical. This cycle determines how quickly you can test, launch and learn. Short cycles mean faster learning, better performance and ultimately better meeting the needs of the marketplace. If you’re a business that depends on iteration, identifying and improving upon your weaknesses in this cycle is critical.

The information cycle online looks like this:

1. Concept: determine what you are building, define the metrics you will measure
2. Launch: build and take into production the product, feature, campaign, etc.
3. Collect (monitor): Allow sufficient time for enough data to be collected to have meaningful results
4. Analyze: How successful were you? How were the key metrics impacted? What worked and what didn’t?

and of course cycles again back to concept.

If you are unable to execute quickly on any one of these four components, your business will get trounced by someone who can. There is certainly a tremendous amount of depth in each of these components and entire books are written about each one. We’re working on improving the cycle at JB, although our cycle is slower than we’d like it to be today.