How Erin Weigel spends the summer

Short, inspirational, summer stories from your favourite people in the space.

Aug 11, 2025

As of next week, I’ll be returning to a normal Experimental Mind.

Following last week’s edition, we continue checking in with experiment-minded people on how they’re spending the summer, what they’re learning, and what’s ahead for them in the coming months.

For this second edition, I asked Erin Weigel to share her reflections. Erin helps companies design better customer experiences through evidence-based experimentation, drawing on years of hands-on product design and optimization work. You can connect with her on LinkedIn or explore her writing and projects at erindoesthings.com.

Thanks to Convert and Sitespect for their continued support.

What does your summer look like this year?

This summer I’m spending time with my family in the US. And although I’m taking a little time off, I have client work that I’m spending time on, too.
I’ve been working at Pieter Boonstra and the team at ConversieKracht in The Netherlands as an advisor for quite some time now. And because it’s been so fun, I’m ramping up the time I spend with them.
Since I’ve worked mainly in large, corporate settings, working with ConversieKracht rounds-out my skill set with small-to-medium-sized businesses who don’t have millions of daily visitors.
It’s also been really insightful to get some lived experience working with different tools. (I’ve mainly used ABsmartly, the platform at Booking.com, and Deliveroo’s in-house tool.) So, now I’m starting to understand why people are concerned about running parallel experiments (performance issues with front-end code snippets!) and how to better answer questions people have about Bayesian vs. Frequentist stats. I’ve been spoiled with regards to tooling when I worked at Booking.com.
Agency life has different considerations than corporate life. But even though stakeholders are different and traffic sizes are smaller, the core foundations remain the same.
I’ve also been redesigning ABsmartly’s website. So that means I’m getting more B2B experimentation experience. Follow me on LinkedIn if you want to learn about my design process while working on the ABsmartly project.
Maybe I’ll write something about everything I’ve learned by experimenting on:
B2C sales funnels in large corporations,
Design systems in large corporations,
B2B sales funnels in a small company,
B2B in complex task-oriented applications, and
B2C sales funnels for small companies.

What are you reading, watching, or learning that's feeding your thinking?

I’ve been reading The Empire of AI with Sani Manić and Lukas Vermeer. It’s a much-needed counter balance to the incredible hype that’s happening right now.
And I recently finished two great books: Talia Wolf’s “Emotional Targeting” and Emma Stratton’s “Make it Punchy”. They’re both super useful if you want to get better at B2B content design and writing.
I’m also reading a medical book, called “Disjointed”. I recently found out that my lifetime struggle with migraine, chronic pain, and exhaustion is caused by a genetic disorder. So, if you struggle with health issues that have made you feel crazy or weak or like a “complainer”—I see you. Don’t give up.
I’ve also been experimenting with ways to add AI into my workflows. There are some useful things I’ve found to do with it in spite of the hype nonsense.
Number one is coding. I do front-end development, and it’s helped me build complex apps with JavaScript that I otherwise would have gotten stuck with. It gets stuck and creates bugs along the way. But I know enough that I can get it unstuck and keep going to get the end result I want.
I’ve also been using Recraft AI to generate illustrations from my different illustration styles. So that saves me a lot of time not having to hand draw stuff on my iPad!
It hasn’t been helpful with wire framing or larger scale tasks. So critical thinking and foundational design work is still needed to get a good result.
That said, AI is a useful tool in specific situations for scoped tasks. I’ll keep playing with it to find new ways to help me do things faster.

What’s something you're looking forward to in the second half of the year?

I’m looking forward to going down to France to spend time with my friend in the abandoned French villa we’re fixing up.
In the past year we’ve spent a lot of time and money on getting the house back on the electrical grid, hooked up to the local sewer system, and getting water pipes up-and-running. I took some plumbing and electrical courses a couple of months ago, so I’ll be hanging toilets, sinks, showers, and light fixtures. It’s fun to do things with my hands and make stuff work in the real world, too.
Here are some progress pics for anyone interested: