Why “getting in reps” is the best way to learn
Simply putting in the time is not enough
Sometimes people ask me for career advice. This must mean I’m getting old. Usually, they want to know about skills to learn, books to read, where to find inspiration, stuff like that. But my favorite advice is not about what to learn; it’s about how to learn:
Find a way to get in lots of reps, especially early in your career. Look for companies or teams where repetition and iterative design are part of the culture. If you can’t find that culture, do whatever you can to create it.
What does it mean to “get in reps”? It’s shorthand for the idea of structured learning through repetition. Think of a musician doing scales, or a basketball player practicing shots, or a software designer testing a prototype and fixing the problems. Simply putting in the time is not enough. To truly learn, you need to structure your “reps” with a clear goal, feedback, and a chance to try again.
I learned the value of repetition a long time ago, and I’ve been working to make it a part of my life ever since.
Early in my career, I worked at a startup called FeedBurner. We put in long hours, made quick decisions, pushed to production late at night, and released software that wasn’t quite polished or bug-free. And because we did our own customer support—each of us, from the CEO down to the 22-year-old designer (me)—we heard about what was broken, what people wanted, and where they got confused.
I learned a ton working at FeedBurner, but I can’t help wondering how it might have been different with more repetition. For example, we could have done more testing with customers. We could have created realistic prototypes before writing production-ready code. How much more could I have learned? How much more successful might we have been?
Four years later, after Google acquired FeedBurner, I was casually interviewing with a few startups and comparing those opportunities to another offer: the chance to join Google Ventures as an operating partner. I thought about FeedBurner, how we moved fast but didn’t get in a lot of reps, and I realized that GV could be the ideal learning environment. I’d get to work with dozens of startups: trying things, getting feedback, and putting those lessons into action right away.
In 2012, when we recruited Jake Knapp to join us, we also brought his Design Sprint process to GV. We cranked the learning up to 10. With sprints, we had a structured approach to learning through repetition. In fact, that’s the whole point of a sprint: bring what you know, prototype your best ideas, test them with customers, then do it again.
Anatomy of a rep
I’m convinced that structured repetition with feedback is the best way to get better at anything. But in order for it to work, these “reps” need three elements.
First, you need a clear goal and a way to measure success. It’s easy in basketball; you can look at whether the shot went in. In business, you need to do a little work to set your goal and figure out what kind of research or measurement you’ll use.
Second, you need to get feedback during each rep. Both internal feedback (from a coach, manager, or co-worker) and external feedback (from the market or audience) are essential. External feedback tells you if you were successful, and internal feedback helps you improve on the next rep. Think of the basketball example again: when you miss a shot, your coach tells you what to do differently next time.
And third, you need an opportunity to put that feedback into practice right away. In other words, you need another rep! This is where true learning happens. Without another rep to apply what you learned, you can’t be sure you took the right lesson from the feedback.
Immediate opportunities to apply what you learned are often missing from professional work. In a typical linear project with a beginning, middle, and end, you have to wait until the next project to use your new knowledge. The best companies are structured for iterative design and market feedback. It’s one of the reasons we believe so strongly in the sprint—it gives teams a recipe for creating an environment of learning.
What’s most surprising about “getting in reps” is that the benefits go way beyond learning. Working in sprints (or any kind of structured repetition) is guaranteed to help you learn, but it also leads to higher-quality work in the end. It’s practically magic.
Learning leads to quality
There’s a classic story from the book Art & Fear that’s popular in design, engineering, and management circles. Maybe you’ve heard it:
The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class, he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pounds of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot—albeit a perfect one—to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time, and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity.
The story might be apocryphal, but it rings true for me. When I embrace the “many reps” approach and do my work in an environment of iterative learning, the results are dramatically better than when I think really hard and toil at building the perfect solution.
A few years ago, I saw Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram, speak at a conference in San Francisco. I’ll never forget what he said: During the early days of Instagram, he and Kevin Systrom built a new prototype every week. Each weekend, they’d install the prototype app on their phones and share it with beta users. They’d use it all weekend, and then on Monday, begin work on an improved prototype for the next weekend.
You already know how the story ends: Instagram became one of the most successful mobile apps of all time. It’s not a coincidence that they got there by getting in lots of reps.
For a recipe for structured learning through repetition, check out Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days. In the book, we provide hour-by-hour instructions on running your own sprint and behind-the-scenes stories from Slack, Airbnb, Medium, and many more.