"Here's what actually happened: A Microsoft employee working on Bing proposed a seemingly minor change to how the search engine displayed ad headlines. The idea required minimal effort-just a few days of engineering time-but it was buried among hundreds of other proposals. Program managers deemed it insignificant and let it languish. The breakthrough came when an engineer, recognizing the low development cost, decided to test the idea anyway."
"Within hours, the modified headline format was generating revenue at such unusually high rates that it activated the system's automated 'too good to be true' warning. The results were staggering: a 12% increase in revenue, translating to more than $100 million annually in the United States alone. But here's the twist that should keep every business leader awake at night: This became Bing's most successful revenue-generating idea in company history,"
A small, low-effort change to ad headline formatting on Bing produced a 12% revenue increase, exceeding $100 million annually in the US. The idea required only days of engineering work and was initially deprioritized amid hundreds of complex proposals. An engineer ran a simple A/B experiment, triggering an automated 'too good to be true' alert when results were unusually strong. The experiment revealed massive impact that program managers and experts had overlooked. The episode demonstrates that inexpensive, easily testable ideas can yield outsized returns and that expert intuition often fails to predict practical success.
Read at Psychology Today
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