Experimental Mind: Build-Measure-LooksGood

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A weekly segment featuring recruiter Mimi VerLoren van Themaat from Blooming People, who shares valuable tips, market insights, and job opportunities – ready to bloom? This week's tip:

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🔎 Interesting reads you probably missed

Experimentation is becoming more commonplace, but this positive development is often hampered by a common problem. I see company after company testing product ideas with users and customers, collecting the results, but then failing to take meaningful action — no parking of ideas or pivoting. I call this the Build-Measure-LooksGood! loop.

Dan Frank describes how to build a experimentation platform in one day:

... spinning up a new experimentation platform feels like a big investment. It surely can be, but I want to dispel the myth that you need a ton to get started. Instead, most of the ingredients you already have and in most cases there’s no need to get fancy.

Georgi Georgiev made a meta analysis of more than a thousand A/B tests.

How long does a typical A/B test run for? What percentage of A/B tests result in a ‘winner’? What is the average lift achieved in online controlled experiments?

... quasi-experimental estimates of the impact of social media on mental health by leveraging a unique natural experiment: the staggered introduction of Facebook across U.S. colleges

Or read Sinan Aral Twitter thread with the highlights:

Sinan Aral @sinanaral

A 🧵 about an important and amazing paper by @RoeeLevyZ, my @MITSloan colleague @alexeymakarin and Luca Braghieri on: The *Causal* Link between Social Media Use and Mental Health... Now forthcoming in AER. https://t.co/m5x3JIIA2b

Ryan Luch answers the question:

What's the only kind of marketing project that costs millions, often loses millions more, and still gets stamped with "Mission Accomplished"? ... website redesigns

Good article about the upcoming role of Data Product Manager:

... we need people with broad business skills who can work across the different roles, combine them into effective teams, and bring them home to deliver value to enterprises

Story on Reddit about a PM that ...

... became enamoured with product management after reading Inspired by Marty Cagan and drinking all the koolaid like Continuous Discovery Habits ...

but struggled to get his colleagues to get it. So he decided to stop and just take orders, because ...

The truth is, people just want to deliver features.

🚀 Job opportunities

All featured roles on ExperimentationJobs.com:

• Digital Experimentation & Personalization Manager at Vail Resorts (Remote, USA)

• Product Manager Measurements & Validation at bol.com (Utrecht, Netherlands)

• CRO Specialist (The Netherlands)

• Senior Product Analyst at Vista (Remote, Europe)

• Data Tracking Specialist at Bijenkorf (Amsterdam, NL)

Are you hiring? Submit your job post here.

📅 Upcoming events

Final call: Ronny Kohavi’s class Accelerating Innovation with A/B Testing starts next week. I attended his class in August and can highly recommend it. Use this link to get $50 Amazon gift card.

All upcoming events in the coming weeks:

• 25-26 Oct: CXL Live (Austin, Texas)

• 💡 31 Oct: Accelerating Innovation with A/B Testing (online)

• 3 Nov: Dutch CRO Awards (Amsterdam, NL)

• 18-20 Nov: Conversion Hotel (Texel, the Netherlands)

• 🆕 8 Dec: Experimentation Elite (London, United Kingdom)

Also checkout the full overview of events for next months.

💬 Quote of the week

"Research, experimentation, and learning are very troubling notions for the executive who wishes the product org to be output-focused, efficient, and compliant." — Itamar Gilad

Fun of the week

These pumpkins must be the scariest thing any experimenter will see this Halloween. (from Aleksander Fabijan).

👍 Thank you for reading

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Have a great week — and keep experimenting.