The HADI Cycle: testing business ideas with evidence

HADI means Hypothesis, Action, Data, Insight. The team predicts an outcome, makes one bounded change, measures what happened and decides what to do next. The loop does not guarantee growth; it helps reveal weak ideas before they are scaled.

“Improve the website” is too vague. A useful hypothesis names the change, audience, metric and timeframe: “Making delivery terms visible on a product page will increase the share of visitors who begin checkout over the next two weeks.” Record the baseline before making the change.

Action is the limited intervention. Data includes both the number of people exposed and the number who completed the intended step. Insight is a decision to keep, revise or discard the idea — not simply a chart that moved upward.

Small samples, seasonality and parallel campaigns can distort the result. For expensive decisions, use a more controlled experiment and enough observations to support a conclusion.

Use HADI for landing pages, onboarding, messages and support flows. Keep a shared log of hypotheses, results and decisions so the next cycle starts from evidence rather than repeating an old guess.