Experimental Mind: Idea Validation

🔎 Interesting reads you probably missed

Recruiter Mimi VerLoren van Themaat shares five essential soft skills and how to improve them:

1. Empathy

2. Communication skills

3. Creative problem solving

4. Time management

5. Critical thinking

Itamar Gilad shares the spectrum of validation techniques.

Many in the industry believe it’s all about “running experiments”. While experiments are the gold standard, of validation, there are many other, far cheaper and more immediate ways to test an idea. By fixating on experiments many companies set the bar too high, miss out on easier opportunities, and often give themselves an excuse to keep doing things the old way.

Adam Stone shares his standard SQL script he uses for summary stats.

Even if you use experimentation platform apps ... I find it vital to understand exactly how these apps pull from different source tables to compute summary metrics.

This is still pure speculation, but there are signs that Google might be stopping with Google Optimize. The Convert team put everything we know together.

Still sitting on your 2022 training budget? Spend it at CXL Ton Wesseling will teach you how to get more wins, bigger wins and more insights from your experimentation efforts.

🚀 Job opportunities

You will now find 100 opportunities on ExperimentationJobs.com!

All featured roles:

• 🆕 Conversion Specialist at Google (Berlin, Germany)

• 🆕 Experimentation Specialist at TalkTalk (Manchester, UK)

• CRO Specialist at viaBovag (Utrecht, Netherlands)

• Causal Inference Intern at Netflix (Los Gatos, USA)

• Sr Data Scientist Experimentation at Skyscanner (London, UK)

Want to see your open role on the board? Submit a link here

📅 Upcoming events

📍 London, 8th December 2022

Only three events left in 2022:

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

• 29 Nov: CRAP Talks #20 (London, United Kingdom)

• 🆕 3 Dec: MeasureCamp (Brussels, Belgium)

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

Also checkout the full overview for inspiration for 2023.

💬 Quote of the week

From Duolingo's Q2 2022 shareholder letter:

"... [what] has helped us grow is one of our core operating principles: Test Everything, by which we actually mean A/B test everything.” — Luis von Ahn (CEO Duolingo)

😄 Fun of the week (1/2)

Iqbal Ali responds to the 'CRO will die' discussion that is doing the rounds.

😄 Fun of the week (2/2)

This one also made me smile ...

Sascha O'Sullivan @saschaosullivan

£55k to turn up to meetings and say “I’m not sure” sounds excellent tbh https://t.co/qtQNrNyt6j

👍 Thank you for reading

If you’re enjoying the Experimental Mind newsletter please share this email with a friend or colleague. Looking for inspiration how to best do that? Take a look at what others are saying.

Have a great week — and keep experimenting.