Experimental Mind: Hippo's, Mountains, Slacking, Growing Experimentation Culture

📰 What I've been reading this week

Jeff Gothelf on how to tame the hippo:

Every company makes decisions based on the highest paid person's opinion. It turns out it's just a hypothesis.

The second post in a multi-part series on how Netflix uses A/B tests to inform decisions and continuously innovate on our products.

2. Funnels vs Mountains

We are all familiar with the conversion funnel. Tom Kerwin makes the case we should actually turn it around: it's a mountain.

We can increase people's motivation to climb the mountain by reducing the height, making the climb easier, or make the top of the mountain more desirable.

Read his Twitter thread.

Tips from Bhavik Patel on how to cope with a losing experiment:

My one rule for running experiments is: “remain emotionally detached”.

Post from Eric Weber on creating value from data (products):

... what *value* are you creating for your customers and how do you know you are creating that value? Answering this question is hugely important.

Tom Kerwin @tom_d_kerwin

You've heard of the conversion funnel. It's actually upside down. It looks more like a mountain. You’re asking prospects to climb your mountain. And getting to the top takes a certain amount of motivation. (Yes, this is a disgraceful oversimplification of CRO for funnels.)

Last week the Experiment Nation organized their virtual conference with a diverse set of speakers with talks on all kinds of topics around experimentation. In case you've missed it, you can you can still get access to some of the sessions.

One of the biggest mistakes organizations make as they scale is they try to optimize for utilization. That's a fancy way of saying "keeping everyone busy."

Jacob Singh makes the case for building in slack.

5. Grow an experimentation culture at your company

Ben Dressler (former Spotify) shares his ideas in this short lecture series:

🚀 Job opportunities

This week's featured jobs: 

• Digital Marketer at ING, (Amsterdam, the Netherlands)

• Full Stack Developer Experimentation at Booking.com (Amsterdam)

• Data Product Owner, Customer Experience at Vistaprint (remote EU)

• Experimentation Insights Director at Nike (Beaverton, US)

• Data Analyst Experimentation at bol.com (Utrecht, the Netherlands)

• Data Scientist at Bellingcat (remote EU)

And ... there are another 11 opportunities on the job board.

📅 Upcoming events

This is a running list of upcoming events:

• Future Data (Oct 13, online)

• DDMA Dutch CRO Awards (Nov 4, Amsterdam)

• MIT Conference on Digital Experimentation (Nov 4-5, online)

• The Conference formerly known as Conversion Hotel (Nov 19-21, NL)

💬 Quote of the week

"Always make sure you’re doing little experiments every day to move yourself forward on the things you’re interested in." — James Altucher

😉 Fun of the week

Wally invents data

🙏 Thanks for reading

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Have a great week — and keep experimenting.

Kevin

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