Choosing the right bets to play and gaining better odds

Tomorrow is Australia's largest annual horse race, the Melbourne Cup. What is your strategy for bagging a winner, do you bet on your favourite number, or the name you like the best. How about past form, what other factors do you think about?

For me betting on horse racing is like getting a top down feature request. It might come with insider information but it does still feel like a wild stab in the dark.

I’ve worked with clients who make big bets on building features for websites or apps based on nothing more that a list of features. With a strategy to launch it by a set date… Even meeting these ambitious goals, they still loose. It's not because they fail to deliver, they failed to understand the correlation of the solution to the outcome they were trying to achieve.

At Open Universities Australia, I work in a product discovery team helping product teams make the right bets. We make them daily on our products. Unlike horse racing though, we don't bet to win, we bet to learn. We design for outcomes and our bets are about proving the economic ramifications of any design decision. By practicing value-based design through research, measurement and experimentation. We make sure what we build will will add value and impact the corresponding business goals.