Feedback Loops Rule Everything Around Me
Thanks for all the feedback on my recent How Weird Should This Blog Be post. My main takeaway is that (most of) you massively overestimate how much mail (most of) your favourite bloggers get; for most writers the answer is "very little," and you can meaningfully determine what someone writes about and/or how happy they feel about writing just by dropping them a line. Email your favourite blogger today!
One big thing that Silicon Valley is right about is the vital importance of tightening feedback loops. They didn't invent this, but I think a lot of businesses could benefit by adopting their cultural obsession with it. (Obvious caveat: I've never worked in Most Businesses, this is all just my view from the outside).
Ceteris paribus, in any given industry, I would bet on the business that has found a way to build an endless feedback-and-improvement loop over the ones that haven't. A lot of the time there's a way to make your product that allows you to constantly solicit and implement feedback, and many other ways that don't, and I don't think people who are not-implementing feedback loops are cognizant of how much they're missing, or even always that the high-feedback alternative exists.
For example, David Chang writes:
My first restaurant, Momofuku Noodle Bar, had an open kitchen. This wasn’t by choice—I didn’t have enough money or space to put it farther away from the diners. But cooking in front of my customers changed the way I look at food. In the early years, around 2004, we were improvising new recipes every day, and I could instantly tell what was working and what wasn’t by watching people eat.
Or Walt Hickey on Marvel comics as test loop for movies:
Marvel Comics was an R&D operation that went on for 60 years that tested, at a very cheap rate all things considered, ideas and concepts and characters, that ... were able to decisively determine what the best possible stories from the best possible characters were.
Making movies is very expensive, making comics is less-expensive, so publishing a ton of comics and seeing which ones readers respond to gives you a much tighter feedback loop than making movies blindly and waiting to see how viewers respond to those. (Even if you show the movies to test audiences before final editing and releasing, you're not getting anywhere near the amount of honing that comics gave you).
Or take my own business of board games. The creator of Settlers of Catan would supposedly playtest every single weekend with his family, stop whenever the game got bad, then change the rules for the next weekend to improve that bottleneck. I would bet on any boardgame creator who found a way to playtest every day, over one who playtests every week, over one who playtests every month. But a significant number of board game creators are only managing to test once per month.
There's a crazy element here where if your boardgame (or other product) is even moderately successful you're anticipating tens of thousands of hours of usage in the wild, which for some games is thousands of times more than they spent on testing it before they launched. This is insane! Some amount of feedback reaches the creator after publication via online reviews and angry emails, which hopefully can be incorporated into version 2, but overall there's a ridiculous disconnect and most of the useful information about the games gets lost (much like most of the information about how restaurant-dishes are received gets lost if the chef is in a closed kitchen).
A great advantage our digital-game-creator cousins have is that they can endlessly track and iterate their games over time; physical games and other physical products can't do that. But I suspect that we can get a lot closer to the ideal by somehow incentivizing more structured feedback from post-publication players, or releasing more and better prototypes with more and better feedback loops before going to market. I've experimented a little with this, but I think there's a million miles further to go, and that it's plausible I could tighten the loop by 100x and make my games 1000x better as a result. If you know how to do this, please let me know.