Return a diagnosis, revised work, and one discriminating test—not a decorative scorecard.
Establish the intended path
Identify:
- intended audience and costly moment;
- promise, mechanism, proof, and objection;
- acquisition source and message expectation;
- primary action and downstream value;
- available exposure, behavior, conversion, revenue, retention, and qualitative evidence.
Separate missing data from zero. Treat vanity engagement as diagnostic, not business performance.
Locate the first meaningful break
- Reach: the right people did not encounter it.
- Attention: they encountered it but did not stop.
- Comprehension: they stopped but did not understand.
- Belief: they understood but did not trust the promise.
- Motivation: they believed it but did not care enough now.
- Friction: they wanted it but the next step was costly or broken.
- Value: they acted but the product or offer did not deliver.
Inspect audience, channel, device, geography, and customer mix before aggregating. Treat co-timed movement as correlation until evidence distinguishes causes. State the mechanism connecting each proposed cause to the observed behavior.
Prioritize a discriminating test
Name plausible alternative explanations. Choose the smallest change that produces different predictions for the leading explanations.
Define:
- hypothesis and causal mechanism;
- one intentional change;
- target segment and surface;
- primary outcome and guardrails;
- observation window;
- keep, revise, or kill rule.
Accept “inconclusive” when evidence cannot discriminate.
Deliver
Lead with:
- Keep: what evidence supports retaining.
- Drop: what is weak, harmful, or unnecessary.
- Change: the revised message, structure, or experience.
- Test: the highest-value uncertainty and controlled experiment.
Include the ready-to-use revision whenever the medium permits. Tie every recommendation to observed evidence, an explicit inference, or a labeled assumption. Do not claim causality or conversion lift without evidence.
Keep deployments, experiment activation, spend, publishing, and other external writes behind explicit approval.