Experimental Mind: Coin Flips & Fun with Flags
Your overview of interesting reads, events and jobs for the experimental mind: #193
Hi, in today’s newsletter a career interview with Sven Schmit, many interersting things you might have missed, 5 selected jobs and an updated event calendar.
➡️ Convert: Experimentation is Human Nature
Experimentation requires infrastructure and rigor. Yet, the concept of experimentation—the ideas you have to seed in your team to actually get to the point where an experimentation program is possible—is as innate to humans as the desire to sleep or eat. Convert supports this in multiple ways.
💬 Sven Schmit: My Experimentation Career Journey
Today’s career interview is with Sven Schmit, the Head of Statistics Engineering at Eppo and a Dutch man living in the Bay Area. Two quotes:
The real power of experimentation does not come from a p-value, but from the culture it builds.
It’s not quite moving at the same pace, but I also see more companies generally embrace a culture of experimentation and increased buy-in from leadership to make data-driven decisions on sound causal analysis.
Read the full interview with Sven
🔎 Interesting things you might have missed
State of Experimentation Survey
Sven Schmit also shared a survey with me. It is collaboration between academics and industry to gain insight into the current state of experimentation across sectors, with results presented at CODE@MIT and made available to the experimentation community while protecting respondent anonymity. Please participate and help shape the future of experimentation. PARTICIPATE
There’s no such thing as “the customer”
Jan Bosch argues that there is no single "customer" that companies should design for, but rather they should clarify customer needs, test hypotheses through experiments, and challenge assumptions to truly understand and deliver value. We should get so close to customers that we can identify needs customers can't yet articulate. READ
10 tips for building a customer obessesed organisation
Jeff Gothelf explains how to build a truly customer obsessed organisation: leaders must take concrete steps like decoupling delivery from performance reviews, shortening planning cycles, and providing feedback forums, while also enabling teams to do product discovery and customer outreach. Admitting when you're wrong, diversifying research, and teaching the business model can further transform culture to focus on customers. READ
[Paper] Fair coins tend to land on the same side they started
Many coin flippers exhibit a same-side bias, landing on the starting side about 51% of the time, confirming earlier predictions. Evidence from 350,757 flips. READ
Experimentation at Delivery Hero is Fun with Flags
Fun With Flags started as a feature flagging tool at Delivery Hero but evolved into a full-fledged experimentation platform that enables data-driven decision making through rigorous, scientific testing methodologies. The platform underwent massive growth, scaling to meet the demands of Delivery Hero's global operations while maintaining a focus on validity, automation, and customization. READ
Introducting Confidence by Spotify
Johan Rydberg shared the vision and a short demo around Confidence, Spotify’s experimentation platform which is now available in beta. WATCH
[Book] Evidence-Guided: Creating High-Impact Products in the Face of Uncertainty
Itamar Gilads’ book is now available. Research shows most products create little value, so companies need a new system combining human judgment with evidence, though it requires challenging common practices; this book offers the actionable GIST model to drive organizational change for higher-impact products. BUY
🚀 Job opportunities
Looking for a new challenge in experimentation? Find 100+ experimentation related jobs on ExperimentationJobs.com. These jobs are from all over the world, on-site, fully remote or hybrid. Take a look and start pivoting your career.
This week's featured roles:
CRO Account Manager at Croud (Shrewsbury, United Kingdom)
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Lead at Netzet (Vilnius, Lithuania)
Optimisation & Experimentation Executive at PetLab (United Kingdom)
Growth Product Manager at Prezi (Europe)
Senior CRO Analist at ClickValue (Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Are you hiring? Submit here
📅 Upcoming events
I will be attending Conversion Hotel next month. Will I see you there?
16-17 Oct: CXL Live (Austin, USA)
17 Oct GrowthHackers Conference (virtual)
26 Oct: Conversion Jam (Oslo/Stockholm)
31 Oct: DDMA Experimentation Heroes (Amsterdam, the Netherlands)
🆕6 Nov: Innovation & AB Testing - the Essentials (virtual)
10 Nov: Conference on Digital Experimentation (Boston, USA)
17-20 Nov: Society for Judgement and Decision Making (virtual)
17-19 Nov: Conversion Hotel (Texel, Netherlands)
🎁4 Dec: Accelerating Innovation with A/B Testing with Ronny Kohavi (virtual,
$1,999$1,499 USD)7 Dec: Experimentation Elite (London)
See all experimentation related conferences & events 2023.
👍 Thanks for reading
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