Experiment Nation: The Podcast

There’s a lot of talk about how to find things to test, how to analyze tests and the importance of iterating on tests. This week, I was thinking about how I could add something a little different to the conversation and decided to share my thoughts about when to run a test - particularly when building products.

Curiosity needs to be a driver in every experimenter’s toolkit. What is going on in the head of my customer? What is really their job-to-be-done? When buying flowers, we typically think of the standard occasions: Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, new baby & sympathy. But if we were to structure our ecommerce website on those occasions alone, we may be addressing the majority, but we’d be missing out on the real motivation behind the purchase as well as other reasons people buy flowers.  By deconstructing the customer’s journey of buying flowers, we discovered a piece of data that was sitting in front of us the entire time… the card message. These wonderfully written messages were our customers literally telling us the reason behind their purchase. It drastically changed how we approached our ecommerce website, now centered around the gifter’s journey.

Even if you are the best Experimenter at your company, unless you are able to nurture a culture of Experimentation - you’ll end up constantly fighting uphill battles. Here are a few quick pointers on how to be a better Experimentation leader.

Pineapple on pizza. If you ever want to have a heated debate with a group of people, ask them if pineapple belongs on pizza. Now let’s replace pizza with CRO and pineapple with “best practices” (or whatever topic CROs are angry about on LinkedIn these days).

Watch this session on Youtube: https://youtu.be/JqT95k7eG_8

About this series: Rommil Santiago, the founder of Experiment Nation shares his most recent thoughts about the industry and the craft of Experimentation in less than 5 minutes.

Based on a brand new obsession (thanks to the pandemic) for homemade pizza, I would like to talk about how optimisation is just like cooking that perfect pie.  You can have all of the tools in the world, but do you have the experienced chef and the right ingredients. Sure, you can cook up a quick Margherita in under an hour, but does it taste good. But, what if you left the dough to rise for a few days? Well, you’d get a much better flavour, and a smooth experience.  Optimisation and Pizza Making are the same and I will help you understand how and why it is beneficial to let your dough prove for longer.

About this series: Rommil Santiago, the founder of Experiment Nation shares his most recent thoughts about the industry and the craft of Experimentation in less than 5 minutes.

Florent Buisson is a decade-long behavioral economist who published a practical guide to behavioral data analysis in business. It's the book he wished he had when he started in analytics. In this episode, he shares: Plus other statistical concepts explained in a way even a five-year-old could understand.Why intuition can actually be a good thing in data analytics If you need to know R or Python to understand your users Why and when causal analytics are important -- Florent Buisson is a behavioral economist with 10 years of experience in business, analytics, and behavioral science. He most recently started and led for four years the behavioral science team of one of the largest insurance companies in the US; he then published Behavioral Data Analysis with R and Python (O'Reilly), the book he wished he had had when he started. Florent holds a PhD in behavioral economics from the Sorbonne university in Paris. Find Florent on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/florentbuisson Read Florent's content on Medium: medium.com/@florent.buisson

About this series: Rommil Santiago, the founder of Experiment Nation shares his most recent thoughts about the industry and the craft of Experimentation in less than 5 minutes.