Experimental Mind: Turbulent Times

😎 Summer Series

Bithika (Mayo Clinic) shares the good, bad and ugly from her personal experiment with mixing travel, family visits with working across time zones.

Denise (bol.com) tried a new sport (can you guess which?) and also shares some great book resources.

🔎 What I've been reading and listening

In this article the authors offer a new approach and mindset for making strategic decisions, along with a new model for managing strategy development and performance monitoring. They describe five steps:

1. Define Extreme but Plausible Scenarios

2. Identify Strategic Hedges and Options

3. Run Experiments Before Locking in Investment

4. Identify Trigger Points, Signposts, and Metrics

5. Provide Prescriptive Surveillance

Some topics from the latest added podcasts: marketplace experimentation, separating ideas from evidence and evidence-based product decisions.

... you may be told to Work Backwards like Amazon, use OKRs and 20% projects like Google, or organize according to the Spotify Model. These mega-successful companies obviously know something we don’t, so using their processes sounds like a logical shortcut to success.

How Big Tech companies innovate and create mega-successful products. The answer goes much deeper than just process.

One effective approach is to check the balance of key metrics using historical data and then re-randomize using a different hash ID if the difference between the treatment and the control is too large.

Interview with Cassie Kozyrkov (Chief Decision Scientist at Google Cloud) on choosing the right career path and the value of data analytics.

🚀 Job opportunities

Ask Media Group is looking for a skilled Product Manager with a focus on experimentation.

Check out the job board to find all other open roles. You can now also subscribe to @experimentationjobs on Instagram.

📅 Upcoming events

All upcoming events in the next months:

• 20-23 Sep: Nonprofit Innovation & Optimization Summit

• 20 Sep: Growthhackers Conference (virtual)

• 🆕 21-22 Sep: How to build

• 26-30 Sep: Experiment Nation Conference (virtual)

• 20-21 Oct: Conference on Digital Experimentation (Boston)

• 25-26 Oct: CXL Live (Austin, Texas)

• 🆕 31 Oct: Accelerating Innovation with A/B Testing (virtual)

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

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

See the full overview of events to find other events and conferences for you and your team.

💬 Quote of the week

"It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong." — Richard Feynman

😉 Fun of the week

Cartoon from xkcd on Selection Bias.

🙏 Thank you for reading

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Have a great week — and keep experimenting.

Kevin