Loud Thinking April 28, 2014 at 01:38PM

Build an Experimentation Culture with Testing

Whether you sell a service, a product, or content, you’re creating value for your customer base – and every interaction with your product online is a measurable amount of value. To understand and utilize this, implement well-executed A/B testing, which involves, at its core, showing different user experiences to different users to measure the impact of those differences.
Keep the team small. You only need an engineer, a designer/front-end developer, and a business analyst to perform tests. Make sure that your product person has the skills to analyze tests promptly.
Test small changes. If you’re spending a lot of time creating a test, you’re doing it wrong. Find the smallest possible amount of development you can do to create a test based on your hypothesis; one variable at a time is best.
When a test fails, don’t give up. Instead, learn what happened (which metric did move?), and use that to inform future iterations. Keep a backlog of previously run tests, and re-test ideas later.

Adapted by HBR from “ A/B Testing and the Benefits of an Experimentation Culture” by Wyatt Jenkins.

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