April 2020 Round-up: Leaning on Technology, Rethinking Strategies, Discovery-Driven Digital Transformation and more!

Experimentation News: April 2020

Marketers need to rethink their strategies for these extraordinary times: Embrace digital and optimization – Smartbrief.com – by Mike Herrick

People will be shopping online more than ever in the coming weeks. Marketers and customer experience (CX) teams that already have established audiences across multiple digital channels are better positioned to reach customers for new policies, services, tips or offers to assuage fears. Let’s look at a couple of key ways in which all marketers can rework their strategies by applying a greater digital lens. Read more…

Striving For Customer-Centricity? Don’t Lean Too Heavily On Technology – Forbes – By Chris Goward

Don’t get me wrong; tools and platforms are important components of customer experience optimization, but unless companies have a thriving customer-obsessed culture, where the tool serves a strategy (and not the other way around) wielded by an empowered team that is laser-focused on understanding and meeting their customers’ emotional and functional needs, then the technology investment is likely doomed to fail. Read more…

Facebook Adds a New ‘Experiments’ Element to Ad Manager to Help Optimize Ad Performance – SocialMediaToday.com – By Andrew Hutchinson

“Experiments combines multiple types of tests, formerly labeled as Test and Learn and Split Testing, allowing marketers to A/B test campaigns and measure conversion and brand lift in one place. With a more streamlined interface in Ads Manager, it’s easier to choose the right test for a business goal, create tests, scale what’s working, integrate insights into marketing strategies and help a business grow.” Read more…

Discovery-Driven Digital Transformation – Harvard Business Review – By Rita Gunther McGrath and Ryan McManus

At WellMatch, an Aetna business unit, experimentation helped resolve disagreements about design decisions. According to Etugo Nwokah, the former chief product officer, one area of disagreement involved its website: Every group in the unit wanted to have its content appear on the landing page. The trial entry page ended up being so busy that it confused consumers. The company had to go back to the drawing board and do a redesign—but was able to do so at a much lower cost and risk than if the webpage had been launched for real. Read more…

To Market to an Upended World, Test, Test, Test – Bain.com – By Richard Lichtenstein, Eric Almquist and Zak Prauer

Simple A/B tests make it possible to experiment with different messages, promotions or packaged offers. Covid-19 has led to some significant changes in consumer behavior, and that’s made testing audience important, too. Quarantined adults aged 65 and older who perhaps never would have considered buying groceries online are now turning to these services. To better understand the ramifications of that change, a retailer or food company might set up an A/B test to measure which messages are most effective with that new demographic. One test group would see a message emphasizing a value proposition unique to adults 65 and older, while the other would show the same message to existing online grocery shoppers. Read more…

LinkedIn details how it keeps new features from promoting inequality – VentureBeat.com – By Kyle Wiggers

Starting last year, LinkedIn says it began tracking the inequality impact of the experiments on core business and member value metrics. It also created a special multidisciplinary team that discusses the impact of notable experiments, and that invites the owners of the products to a working session to discuss the impact.

Each experiment started with the questions:

If feature A were to be rolled out, what would be the share of contributions from the top 1% of members, in terms of engagement and contributions?
Would inequality impact go up or down between LinkedIn’s most and least engaged members? Read more…

Digital fashion surges in a sales downturn – VogueBusiness.com – By Maghan McDowell

The Forma app, launched in 2019, lets users try on fashion virtually by uploading a front-facing image of themselves or selecting a model. Online bridesmaid dress brand Birdy Grey, which added Forma to its site in February, saw a 5 per cent conversion lift in A/B testing for customers who had access to the tool. Shoppers who start a try-on are more than six times more likely to complete a purchase, Birdy Grey CEO Grace Lee says, and the brand has since rolled out the try-on to all customers. Read more…

Rethinking your e-commerce strategy during covid19 – New Republique – By Nima Yassini

You need to understand the new behaviour paradigm: why are people landing on your site in the current context? Is your website optimised to convert that traffic? What tests can you run to find out why they’re behaving the way they are? Read more…

Creating a Culture of Experimentation — The Mozilla Story – By Matt Grimes

It was around this time that our senior leadership team approached me and a few colleagues of mine and asked us to help create a new curriculum for a program called the Culture of Experimentation. The program was described as “an attempt to bring about an organization-wide cultural shift towards empowering brave experimentation in all things across all functional roles in the Mozilla organization.” While that description is accurate, it’s a bit dense. Ultimately, what we were being asked to do was to change the entire culture of Mozilla in a grassroots way. This would require teaching people the skills they need to make evidence-based decisions, no matter what job function they perform. This type of experimental, evidence driven culture should be the new norm if we never want to repeat our past mistakes! Read more…

What Makes You an Effective Leader in Crisis Situations? – European Business Review – By David De Cremer

Unfortunately, because a crisis situation increases uncertainty, the default of most leaders will be to shy away from the unknown. Hence, most companies will stick to the status quo and wait until the crisis is over. Such a response is always a missed opportunity. Indeed, when a crisis is over, many things will not be the same as before. As such, the old ways of working may not be sufficient anymore. If you have not experimented and learned from failures when the crisis was in place, you are not prepared to meet new demands from your stakeholders (induced by the mere fact there was a crisis) and miss out on new growth opportunities. Read more…

Past Events and Webinars from Widerfunnel

[NEXT WEBINAR] Overcoming Uncertainty: The Transformation of Heifer International – April 29th 2020

Past webinars:

Who’s hiring?

Apple – Product Manager, Experimentation Platforms (Cupertino, CA)
Medium – Director of Product, Reader and Subscriber Growth (San Francisco, CA)
Eero – Growth Marketing Manager (San Francisco, CA)
The Athletic – Product Manager – Growth (San Francisco, CA)
Lyft – Product Marketing Manager (San Francisco, CA)
Pinterest – Data Scientist, Ads Experimentation (San Francisco, CA)
Agoda – Head of Experimentation – Product (San Francisco, CA)
Facebook – Research Manager, New Product Experimentation (Menlo Park, CA)
CBS Interactive – Product Manager, Growth (Burbank, CA)
SurveyMonkey – Product Manager, Growth (San Mateo, CA)
Rakuten Rewards – Product Analyst (San Mateo, CA)
GoDaddy – Senior Product Manager – Machine Learning and Experimentation (Sunnyvale, CA)
Capital One – Sr. Associate, Product Management, AI Experimentation Platform (Vienna, VA)
Capital One – Sr. Manager, Data Science, Experimentation & Testing (Vienna, VA)
Widerfunnel – Web Developer (Vancouver, BC)
Lululemon – Product Manager (Vancouver, BC)
Realtor.com – Senior Product Manager (Vancouver, BC)
Metro Inc. – Senior Manager, eCommerce Customer Acquisition and Retention (Toronto, ON)
Greenlight Financial Technology – Experimentation Manager (Atlanta, GA)
HBO – Sr. Product Manager – Experimentation (NYC, NY)
Tory Burch – Manager, Testing & Optimization (NYC, NY)
Macy’s – Lead, Experimentation (NYC, NY)
NBCUniversal Media – Manager, Product & Content Experimentation, Peacock, DTC (NYC, NY)
The Walt Disney Company – Data Scientist – Disney+ Product Experimentation (NYC, NY)
Galaxy Solutions – A/B Tester (Somerset, NJ)
Epic Games – Product Manager (Cary, NC)
Ramsey Solutions – A/B Testing & Experimentation Analyst (Franklin, TN)
Reebok – A/B Testing and Personalization Manager (Boston, MA)
ADT – Manager, A/B Testing & Optimization (Boca Raton, FL)
StarTribune – A/B Testing & Optimization Analyst (Minneapolis, MN)
DocuSign – Senior Data Scientist – Experimentation (Seattle, WA)

Do you know of an upcoming event or current job posting we should include in this round-up? Let us know in the comments section below, and stay tuned for our next experimentation news round-up next month!