In our Strategyzer Innovation Sprints, we’ve been experimenting with a reporting structure to help teams boost insights and track their progress in the process of testing business ideas.

We came up with a new weekly reporting structure because teams often get lost in the details of testing and failed to systematically focus on learning and progress. The new reporting gets teams to focus on the following elements:

1. Hypothesis: Which hypotheses did the team set out to test?
2. Experiment: How did we test the hypothesis in question?
3. Evidence: What data was produced from an experiment to validate or invalidate a particular hypothesis?
4. Insights: What insights did we gain from that data?
5. Action: What are our next actions going to be based on the insights we gained? Will we continue the experiment? Will we go back to the drawing board and change our idea and subsequently the underlying hypotheses? Will we run entirely new experiments?
6. The idea for this structure is simple: teams do weekly progress updates as they test their business idea. I’ve noticed that without this structure teams often get lost in the details of the tests and resulting data and fail to connect those elements back to the critical hypothesis and bigger picture business idea.
   This might seem trivial, but I’ve personally seen the challenge teams have with staying connected to the bigger picture and not getting lost in the data on a weekly basis. Navigating between nitty gritty data points and what it means for the bigger idea is not as simple as it sounds in theory. At the end of the day there’s only one thing that matters: are we on track towards turning our initial idea into a value proposition that matters to customers embedded in a profitable and scalable business model. Keep your eyes focused on the prize.