The Spreadsheet of Doom: 10 signs you’ve outgrown manual experiment tracking

“Spreadsheet of doom” is the phrase teams use when their experiment log has outgrown Excel or Google Sheets. It starts small: a few columns, a few tests. Then someone adds a tab for research. Then another for decisions. Then the formulae break, the links rot, and the only person who knows where everything is has just left for a new job. If that’s you, you’re not alone. Here are 10 signs it’s time to move on.

10 signs you’ve outgrown spreadsheets

1. 1Someone leaves and their tab with "the real numbers" vanishes.
2. 2You’ve tested the same thing twice because nobody could find the first result.
3. 3Decisions live in Slack. Rationale lives nowhere.
4. 4The "experiment log" has 14 columns and still doesn’t answer "why did we ship that?"
5. 5Linking research to hypotheses means copy-pasting URLs into a cell.
6. 6Revenue impact is a back-of-the-envelope guess with no audit trail.
7. 7Stakeholders ask for a programme overview and you rebuild a deck from six sources.
8. 8Version control is "Experiment Log v3 FINAL (use this one).xlsx".
9. 9You spend more time maintaining the spreadsheet than running experiments.
10. 10New joiners need a 90-minute walkthrough of the tabs before they can contribute.

What you gain by switching

Purpose-built experiment management gives you: one place for research, hypotheses, experiments, and decisions, so nothing lives in a tab only one person knows about; iteration chains that link “what we tried” to “what we learned” to “what we did next”; Bayesian analysis so you don’t have to build or bolt on stats; decision capture with rationale and optional revenue impact; and no version-control-by-filename: everyone works in the same system.

Migration doesn’t have to be a project

Most teams export their experiment log to CSV, map the columns to the new system, and are up and running in a few days. You don’t need consultants or a six-month implementation. You need: an export, a clear mapping (hypothesis, status, results, decision), and a decision to stop maintaining a spreadsheet that was never meant to be your source of truth.

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