If you don't have the courage to fail, you'll never build anything great
How to build a product team that moves fast & takes smart risks
"If you don’t have the courage to fail, you’ll never build anything great." Great products are built on speed and risk. Here’s how Dane Molter pushes teams to test fast and scale big.
Dane Molter, VP of Product and Strategy at Navan, has spent years building teams that operate courageously to get outsized returns.
Here’s how to build a product team that moves fast and takes smart risks.
Check out the full episode with Dane here:
Run small, cheap, fast tests
Small tests can drive big wins. Dane urges teams to run quick, inexpensive tests rather than spend months building complex features before validating them.
In a former role at Expedia, Dane’s team ran small tests like tweaking banners, copy, and push notifications. Minor changes boosted engagement and retention without heavy development.
“You may not understand how a single percentage point change on your conversion funnel will shift revenue at first, but go run the test. It’s cheap. It’s fast. Learn from it.”
Challenge assumptions & “best practices”
Dane emphasizes that pushing against conventional wisdom leads to real breakthroughs.
“You’ll always need SMEs, but they’ll tell you, 'You can’t do it like that.' Your job as a product manager is to challenge, push, and deliver something fundamentally different.”
At LogRocket, an idea for our blog site that was initially dismissed as “dumb” went on to nearly quintuple conversion rates.
Small risks can unlock huge opportunities.
Identify leading vs. lagging indicators
Don’t just chase big outcomes. Identify small, measurable leading indicators that drive long-term success.
At Expedia, Dane’s team didn’t just track bookings. They analyzed early signals like app downloads, session length, and return visits to predict larger business outcomes.
“The way you can really contribute to the long-term impact of the business is to understand the little metrics that matter.”
Tie every experiment to a business outcome
Speed matters, but testing without purpose is just noise.
At Navan, the challenge was modernizing corporate travel booking, a traditionally human-driven process. But simply “adding AI” wasn’t enough; it needed to drive measurable value.
Instead of blindly integrating AI, the team set clear objectives: reduce time spent managing bookings and lower costs for companies. By linking experiments to these goals, they made sure their innovations delivered real impact.
Unlock courage: Failure is an option, stagnation isn’t
At Grubhub, leadership challenged him to launch 50 new markets in a year without expanding the ops team. People hesitated. What if a key piece failed?
The response? "If you don’t have the courage to fail, you’re never going to build anything."
That mindset shift drove the team to take smart risks, push past their comfort zone, and rapidly scale Grubhub’s delivery network.