Hits

Earlier this week, while the winner of the World Series was still very much in doubt, I was missing games preparing for our quarterly board meeting and meeting with our leadership team in New York City.

From what I’ve gathered, I’ve missed a pretty entertaining series.

But I’ve also heard that the Dodgers, who have the largest payroll in baseball and were heavy favorites to win, have been hurting themselves in an interesting way: They’re doing something some people say is necessary to win in the postseason, but still losing: Out-homering the other team. 

At the end of Game 5 (while writing this), the Dodgers were losing the series 3-2, despite hitting more home runs (8) than the Blue Jays (7). Why? Only one of Los Angeles’ home runs came with runners on base. Every other home run was “solo.” Of Toronto’s home runs, however, four came with runners on base. So, despite having fewer “big swings,” the ones Toronto have hit have delivered more value.

Coincidentally, a lot of the time we spent this week (both in our board meeting and with our leadership team) was focused on finding ways to grow even faster. Put in a way that fits the metaphor: What big swings can we be taking?

Though we want to be swinging big, we also want to be more like Toronto (getting more value from each “home run”) and less like Los Angeles.

We are doing a lot here.

Just last month, we announced: 

• AI summaries and chat capabilities to more deeply explore test results

• Sitewide analytics that help you understand what drives higher profit per visitor

• Checkout experiences that can build trust and urgency with customers

And it’s not just on the product front. From a services and support perspective, we are often asked some form of “Can I make this test work?” We always try to answer yes.

Our belief is that the more value we deliver for our customers, even smaller amounts of value, the more value we’ll generate for ourselves. Some of those “deliveries,” will also end up delivering an outsized amount of value. Maybe it’s a product development. Maybe it’s an insight from one of those hard-to-make-work tests that turns into a product insight.

But the bet is that the value will accrue in both small “hits” and big “swings,” so that when we do hit big, we reap more rewards for it.

PS – if there are swings, big or small, you want to see us take, let me know!