Lukas Vermeer: My Experimentation Career Journey
Experimental Mind #227 | Summer reflection
Hi folks!
I’m enjoying a couple of weeks off. During these week’s I will share some inspiring experimentation career stories. First up is Lukas Vermeer.
Thanks to Convert, Sitespect and Zoho PageSense for their support.
💬 My Experimentation Career Journey
Today’s interview is with Lukas Vermeer. Lukas has a background in machine learning and computational science. Over the course of his career he has been fascinated by experimentation, how it affects organizations and how it can be used to build products for customers. Lukas has been writing about related topics so that others can learn from it. “I think sharing what you have learned is an important element of the experimentation mindset.”
What is your current experimentation role and what do you do?
I’m currently senior director of experimentation at Vista. I joined three years ago to help accelerate their experimentation practice. They were already running some experiments in silos but thought they could do more. I built up a team that is doing most of the experimentation platform, education, and support work independently now. I’m spending more of my own time in the Product organization more broadly on topics that enable experimentation, such as building up a strong practice of empowered product teams.
How did you enter the experimentation space? What was your first experimentation related role?
I started in business intelligence at Oracle working on a next best action product they had acquired that used reinforcement learning and had a built-in control group to measure impact. I didn’t really understand the power of that approach at the time. When I joined Booking.com as a data scientist, I quickly realized from their extensive A/B testing that most things I was building had no impact on customer behavior. That confrontation with the power of a control group fascinated me. When the product manager for the experimentation platform Jonas Alves left the company, I took over his role on the experimentation platform team. We built out the product to support more types of experiments on more parts of the product, as well as made improvements to the infrastructure and user interface. Together with Roderik Koenders I also facilitated the experimentation training program at Booking for years. This helped me internalize the concepts better, and allowed me to practice explaining them to a broad audience.
How did you start to learn experimentation?
I first encountered experimentation concepts during university, but my real journey began at Booking.com. As a data scientist there, I quickly realized the importance of controlled experiments in understanding what actually works. I became fascinated by experimentation, spending time analyzing other teams’ experiments and helping improve them. My learning came from reading books and papers, but teaching others through regular training sessions as well as providing day-to-day support to experimenters really solidified my understanding. It was a gradual process of hands-on experience, self-study, and teaching that built my expertise over time. I didn’t set out to become an experimentation expert – it grew out of genuine fascination and seizing opportunities to learn and apply it in my work.
How do you apply experimentation in your personal life?
I don’t deliberately run rigorous experiments, but I do tinker with things out of curiosity to learn as much new stuff as I can. For example I got into home automation, hydroponics, and making clothes. I have short bursts of fascination with a topic until I hit a performance plateau where significantly more effort would be needed to improve. Then I tend to move on to something else new and intriguing. The goal for me is not to become highly skilled, just to explore and learn.
What are you currently doing to keep up with the ever-changing industry?
I question whether “keeping up with the industry” is a useful framing. …
Continue reading the full interview with Lukas
In the full interview you will also learn Lukas recommendations to someone who is looking to join the experimentation industry.
🚀 Job opportunities
Got inspired? Find 100+ open roles on ExperimentationJobs.com.
Digital Product Analyst – CRO at Zego (London, United Kingdom)
CRO Product Manager – Digital Markets at Gartner (Barcelona, Spain)
CRO Specialist at Healf (London, United Kingdom)
Senior Software Engineer, Experimentation Platform & Data Tools at Asana (Vancouver, Canada)
Group CRO specialist at Stage Entertainment (Amsterdam, Netherlands)
📣 Testimonials
If you have made it to here and are enjoying this newsletter, I would love to read a short testimonial from you.
Read what others are saying and add your own.
Have a great week — and keep experimenting.
Thanks, Kevin