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PRODUCT.|PHILOSOPHY.|LIFE.

Objectives

Yesterday, I was talking to one of my mentees and he had a few questions on whether it would be better to do MBA or a different Master's degree, or to simply continue working in a product role, whether to study in India or outside the country, etc.

While running A/B tests as Product Managers, we define our hypotheses up front and indicate what kind of an observation in a metric would make us take a decision to launch the feature. 

The reason to do this up front is because there are tens of metrics that can be of interest in such a situation and if we simply look at them after the experiment has been run, without defining our criteria up front, then just by chance, we would have some of these metrics doing well and some not so well. 

And this could tempt us to then cherry pick ones that did well and say, "Oh, this change seems to impact this metric positively, and that's good for me. So let me launch it."

Coming back the decision on what would be better to study, when evaluating what options are better, unless we start with clear objectives of what we want to achieve, we won't be able to objectively say if one is better than the other. 

And if we just look and the pros and cons and then decide, "Oh, this looks like a better option for me", that may not be a good fit for what we want long term.

Start by clarifying your objectives.

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