{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"A Productive Conversation","title":"The Difference Between Experimenting and Tinkering (with Patrick Rhone)","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":3210,"description":"I spoke at Podcast Movement in New York last month, and the whole conference ran on headphones — every attendee wearing a set, switching channels to pick which stage they were listening to. Which meant that partway through my talk, I watched at least one person in front of me switch to somebody else. It was a bold format. I'm still not sure it worked. But it was a real experiment, and I came away thinking about how rarely we name the experiments we're already running.\nPatrick Rhone and I spent this month's PM Talks on that — including a distinction I think matters more than it sounds like it should. Experiments have an end in mind. Tinkering doesn't. One of them produces a decision; the other produces the feeling of progress without ever asking you to make one. We also got into Patrick's unrecorded podcast, which got him mocked by some fairly prominent people at the time and then quietly became the thing everybody does now.\n\nSix Discussion Points\nMost of the choices you make in a day are experiments you never labelled as such — you're acting without knowing the outcome, which is the definition, whether or not you framed it that way.\nThe difference between experimentation and tinkering is an endpoint: an experiment asks a question you intend to answer and then stop, while tinkering is perpetual adjustment that feels productive precisely because it never resolves.\nParameters make an experiment possible rather than constraining it — knowing what you can't control is what tells you what's actually worth testing.\nYou cannot predict which thing will land; after thirty years of writing online, the most-linked post of Patrick's career came from a car conversation with his wife and took twenty seconds to write.\nComing home from a conference with pages of notes almost guarantees nothing happens — picking exactly three (one thing to act on, one person to connect with, one thing to think about) lets the rest fall away without festering.\nStopping is itself an experiment:...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/RaxQE_yNeOcP9CV60hOV3GBXJq5J7iHtixqMZ6k8ieU/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS84ODBi/MTA3MDFjYjQwMDVj/ZGQ2N2I1MjZiNjhh/YTlhMS5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}