Growth Mindset Leading Change Risk & Resilience

Optimal Failure Rate

Tarang Amin

10.25.21

Never failing is too conservative. But what about failing too much? Tarang doesn't ascribe a number to failure rates at e.l.f., but he does look at one key metric: are we moving forward?

Summary:

Never failing is too conservative. But what about failing too much? Tarang doesn’t ascribe a number to failure rates at e.l.f., but he does look at one key metric: are we moving forward?

Thuy

Do you think there's actually an optimal failure rate for projects, like, for example, if you never failed, then you're probably being too conservative, but say if you fail seven out of ten times, is that okay? Is that a good optimal rate?
Tarang_Amin

Tarang Amin

We don't have an optimal rate, the key thing for me is, are we seeing things that didn't work? Because if we're not seeing anything that doesn't work, then we're probably not pushing the envelope far enough, and so we try to create this mode where we're always trying things, and it was back in my consumer career, I remember companies would put in all these different processes to never fail, and yet when you look at new item success rates in the broader market, you saw that only about half of the things people want actually work, so this whole fallacy of you're going to take out failure and be able to take away failure at all, I just thought that was wrong. So, instead, what we try to do is we say, we invite as many ideas as we can, we put them online, we see what works, what doesn't, those are the ideas that we then expand to our national retail partners, and it's a much better way, it's almost built-in failure where you're able to do that in a smaller scale, learn from what works or what doesn't work, and then be able to expand from there, so it's almost built in as a DNA to our overall business model.